2023 Judging Panel
We’re excited to announce the esteemed panel of judges for The Fine Art Textiles Award 2023. Our panel includes experts from a variety of disciplines, all of whom have a deep appreciation for the art of textiles.
Angie Wyman
Course Leader: BA (Hons) Hand Embroidery
Royal School of Needlework
Angie Wyman is Course Leader of the prestigious BA (Hons) Hand Embroidery degree programme at the Royal School of Needlework (RSN), based at Hampton Court Palace. Validated by Kingston University, this is the only specialist degree level course of its kind.
RSN Degree students study hand embroidery within a contemporary context through industry and live projects with external clients for couture, interiors, costume and art textiles during the three years of their study.
Working specifically within embroidery, craft and design, Angie has more than 30 years’ experience of working within Higher Education at Degree and Masters’ level. She is a University External Examiner and Mentor for the Hand & Lock Prize for Embroidery.
Angie is both a practitioner and an academic with a career-long commitment to the promotion and continued practice of embroidery.
Grant Gibson
Writer, Editor and founder of Material Matters
Grant Gibson is a UK-based design, craft and architecture writer and podcaster whose work has been published in: The Observer, New Statesman, The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, FRAME, Dwell, House & Garden and many others.
Grant was made an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Art in 2011 and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 2019, he launched the award-winning podcast Material Matters with Grant Gibson, which was transformed into a fair at Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf in September 2022. It returns later this year.
Jo Hall
Writer, curator and editor of Embroidery Magazine
Jo Hall has more than 30 years’ experience as an editor, writer and reviewer specialising in contemporary textiles in art. She curates the Textile Galleries at The Festival of Quilts and The Knitting & Stitching Shows (2019 to present) and was Editor of Embroidery magazine from 2002-2022.
Jo graduated in Fine Art Textiles from Goldsmiths University, London, and is an Honorary Non Exhibiting Member of The 62 Group.
James Hunting
Educator, artist and questioner
The work of james hunting is a series of identified making, materialised through an ongoing exploration into sexual identity and desire, lived experience and being visible through coded and uncoded artworks.
The works are a constant investigation into the relationship (often uneasy) he has with his making.
“How do I define myself when definitions immediately make me deviate… as the one who makes, I choose the media I need at that time to make”.
Maggie Scott
Textile Artist & Activist
A graduate of St Martins School of Art, British Textile artist Maggie Scott set up her first studio in London in 1980.
Scott’s large-scale works draw on the aesthetic and symbolic potential of the laborious process of felting, her technical practice sitting at the boundary of tapestry and digital media. Her reinterpretations of photographic images often explore the politics of the representation and tensions and contradictions of a black British or black European identity.
Scott is currently working on ‘Fast Fashion and Climate Justice’: The Global North’s Addiction to Cheap Clothing and Landfill in the Global South.
Scott’s works have been exhibited widely in the United Kingdom and internationally, including the USA, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, China and Canada.
Ptolemy Mann
Artist
Ptolemy Mann creates hand-dyed and woven artworks that have become the basis for a modern-day Bauhaus philosophy of art-making underpinned with intelligent colour theory. Her time-consuming and unique approach has evolved over a twenty-five-year period. In recent years she has been making huge gestural paintings on watercolour paper and canvas exploring the relationship between thread and pigment.
Mann is interested in the relationships between colours and their affective potential. For her, painting is an expression of the material world. Optical effects and natural phenomena inspire her to explore the possibilities of her chosen materials: dye, thread, paper, paint and time. Through their rapid and/or laborious application she creates a multi-layered meditation on light and colour.
She has completed many site-specific art installations and has exhibited worldwide. She lectures regularly throughout the UK and abroad, writes for the magazine Selvedge, curates, and has received three grants from the Arts Council of England.
