A former Dundee student has bagged one of the country’s biggest arts graduate prizes for her work inspired by the city’s industrial heritage.
Rhona Jack, 24, a graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (DJCAD), landed the Glenfiddich Residency Award after she built a working loom from discarded roof beams and used it to weave patterned textiles.
She was selected for the award, worth £10,000, after her work was entered into the annual Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) New Contemporaries exhibition, which opens to the public in Edinburgh on Saturday.
She will have a three-month funded residency at Glenfiddich Distillery in Dufftown this summer. Alongside a group of other international art graduates, she will be provided with a house and studio.
The funding also includes a monthly stipend and generous budget for materials.
Rhona Jack, who grew up in Edinburgh and graduated from DJCAD last year, said she was inspired by Dundee’s industrial architecture.
She said: “In each piece of work I create, a great deal of time and energy is exerted in the physical making of the work.
“The idea for the loom came from a fascination with the development of textiles and the need to make something from scratch which was entirely of my own creation.
“Through this work, I am attempting to humanise a whole industry, showing the individual work and creativity that goes into the textile trade.”
At her degree show in May last year, she was awarded the Alastair Smart Memorial Prize for Sculpture.
She will now join contemporary artists from the USA, China, Taiwan and Australia on Glenfiddich’s prestigious programme, named Artists in Residence (AiR).
The AiR programme was launched by distillery owners William Grant & Sons in 2002, and is one of the largest privately funded artist residency programmes in the UK with a total budget of £130,000.
This year is the tenth RSA New Contemporaries exhibition which aims to showcase the best of Scotland’s emerging talent under one roof.
The artists are selected from the graduate shows at Scottish art schools the previous year, and the show includes painting, sculpture, film-making, photography, printmaking and architecture.
The exhibition will take place at the Royal Scottish Academy Galleries at The Mound in Edinburgh from March 24 to April 18.
