MARGARET TAIT AWARD
Glasgow Film Festival is pleased to be offering the fourth year of the Margaret Tait Award, supported by Creative Scotland and LUX.
The aim of the award is to support experimental and innovative artists working within film and moving image and provide a high profile platform for them to exhibit their work and engage with a wider audience. Scottish artists or artists based in Scotland who have developed a significant body of work over the past 3–10 years and are at the cusp of a major impact on the sector are eligible for the Award.
The Margaret Tait Award was launched in 2009 by Glasgow Film Festival, inspired by the pioneering Orcadian filmmaker Margaret Tait (1918–1999). You can read more about Margaret Tait at LUX online.
Artist Rachel Maclean has been announced as the winner of the 2013 Margaret Tait Award.
Rachel will receive a prize of £10,000 and the opportunity to present a new commission at Glasgow Film Festival in 2014. The award is inspired by the wealth of talent emerging from Scotland in experimental film and hopes to raise the profile of the many galleries, curators and arts organisations who support this area of work. It allows Glasgow Film Festival to have a lasting and meaningful impact on the careers of new filmmaking talent, to support new commissions and forge new partnerships across the sector.
Twenty-eight nominations were received for the award and seven artists – Michelle Hannah, Rob Kennedy, Rachel Maclean, Sophie Macpherson, Gillian Steel, Sarah Tripp, and Stina Wirfelt – were shortlisted to put forward a proposal for final selection by Glasgow Film Festival’s Margaret Tait panel.
The judging panel decided unanimously that Rachel Maclean should be the 2013 Margaret Tait Award winner. The panel said:
“Rachel appears most definitely to be on the cusp of something big with upcoming exhibitions this year at the Collective Gallery (Edinburgh) and Edinburgh Printmakers as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival, and a solo show at CCA during the Commonwealth Games in 2014. We find her work extremely unique – it certainly provokes a reaction!
Her proposal was strong and with its relation to national identity, it has a sense of urgency to it and grabs the moment.”
Amanda Catto, Portfolio Manager at Creative Scotland, said:
“We are delighted that Rachel Maclean has been selected as the 2013 Margaret Tait Award winner. The award will allow her the space and time to extend her practice within the medium of film and moving image and to develop partnerships with the film industry. Rachel’s new video work will be a fantastic addition to Glasgow Film Festival which showcases the very best of Scottish, UK and International work.”
Maclean’s proposed film, titled Happy and Glorious, will be a darkly comedic exploration of British national identity, questioning who and what it serves and exploring the complex histories and mythologies which underlie its construction and deconstruction. The film will create a discursive space in response to the context of 2014, in relation to the upcoming referendum on Scottish Independence, as well as the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn and the 100th anniversary of the beginning of The First World War.
Maclean, a graduate from Edinburgh College of Art, is now Glasgow-based. She works largely in green screen composite video and digital print, often exhibiting this alongside props, costumes and related sculpture and painting. She is often the only actor or model in her work, playing a variety of characters that mime to appropriated audio and toy with age and gender. These clones embody unstable identities: conversing, interacting and shifting between cartoonish archetypes, ghostly apparitions and hollow inhuman playthings.
Maclean said: "I am delighted to have received the Margaret Tait Award and can't wait to get started on a new video work. It's a great opportunity to work with GFT and LUX and I am very excited to be a part of Glasgow Film Festival."
Nominations for the Margaret Tait Award 2014 will take place in February 2014.
Previous winners of the Award
2012 winner: Stephen Sutcliffe
Stephen’s film Outwork screened to a packed audience at the 2013 Glasgow Film Festival and was then re-edited for an exhibition at Tramway, Glasgow.
2011 winner: Anne-Marie Copestake
Anne-Marie's film And Under That premiered at the 2012 Glasgow Film Festival, and was followed by a live set from musician/composer Stevie Jones and the band Muscles of Joy. The film and live set has since toured to Bristol, Cafe Oto in London and to Windsor, Canada as part of Media City Film Festival.
2010 winner: Torsten Lauschmann
Torsten debuted his surround-theatre performance At the Heart of Everything a Row of Holes at the 2011 Glasgow Film Festival. He has since performed it at Rio Cinema in London, Tramway in Glasgow and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne.
All the Margaret Tait Award winners’ films are now being made available to venues, for more information please visit the Margaret Tait Award on Tour page.
Margaret Tait Residency
The Margaret Tait Residency will not be running in 2013, but Glasgow Film Festival hopes to offer it again in 2014. For more details please visit the Margaret Tait Residency page.
