WARRINGTON Contemporary Arts Festival 2017 was launched with the announcement of the open competition winners and a ‘cultural crawl’ tour of the venues.
This exciting event gave the public a first glimpse of entries to the Art and Photography Open competitions, which are displayed at Warrington Museum & Art Gallery and The Gallery at Bank Quay House until the end of October.
One of the first place prize of £250 and a solo exhibition in 2018 was awarded to Tracey Hill , Open Art winner and Robert Walker was the winner of the Photography Open. .
Meanwhile the winners of the 2016 Open competitions have been enjoying the solo exhibitions they won last year – a first for both of them.
Artist Bex Ilsleys Emotional Processing is on display at Warrington Museum & Art Gallery throughout the festival until Saturday 28 October, while fine art photographer Steve Deers “A New Perspective” had been on show in The Gallery at Bank Quay House until recently.
Also confirmed for the Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival (WCAF) programme is a new installation called Echo by Holly Rowan Hesson, at Pyramid arts centre.
The installation explores uncertainty, transience and the gap between, and interplay within, purely sensory feeling and experience and more literal, rational thought-based experience and memory.
Holly said: “Echo comprises projection and sculptural work to create dialogues with materials, memory and the physical space.”
Ellen Sampson, an artist who explores the relationships between bodily experience, memory and artefacts, uses film, photography and installation at Warrington Museum & Art Gallery in an exhibition called Worn: footwear, attachment and affective experience.
She said: “This exhibition explores our relationship with and attachment to shoes.
“Focusing on the shoe as an everyday object, and on the embodied experience of wearing, I explore how through touch and use we become entangled with the things we wear.
“I look at how material objects can become records of lived experience and how these traces of experience can be read or understood by the viewer.”
Both of these exhibitions will be on display until January.
Maureen Banner, board chair for Culture Warrington, the charity which organises WCAF, said she was excited about the festival launch and cultural crawl.
“The festival is a major highlight in Culture Warrington’s calendar and a great way for us to come together with our creative community,” she said.
On a sad note this year’s Open Night was the final day with Culture Warrington for Derek Dick, Outreach and engagement manager, who is off to pastures new and who was instrumental in the creation of this fantastic cultural event and a huge part of the town’s Art and culture scene.
