21 August 2012
DJCAD graduate racks up another prize
A multi-award winning graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD) has received a prize of £2000 to enable her to take up a residency position in Finland.
Madeline Mackay (23), who graduated with a degree in Fine Art earlier this year, has just been named as the winner of the Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture's Barns-Graham Travel Award. The funds will help Madeline, originally from Caithness, to undertake her residency at Aland Archipelago, Finland, which will help her to build a professional creative practice.
The residency was offered to Madeline in recognition of the quality of her work, which specialises in vivid avian imagery. Her passion for painting birds came from her experiences of growing up in Caithness, and her images reveal a fascination with unpeopled landscape
Her Degree Show work was so impressive that she was invited to be one of only 55 art graduates from Scotland to be invited to exhibit at the prestigious RSA New Contemporaries 2013 exhibition.
"I'm truly delighted to have won this award," she said. "It has enabled me to realise my desire to work on the stunning Aland islands, which are an ideal site for developing my work. I hope that this project will help me to take my art further and to experiment with ideas that I would otherwise not have been able to pursue.
"Following the residency I will rent a studio in Dundee in order to develop the work from Aland and create work for the RSA Annual exhibition, where the work from the Barns-Graham Award is shown, and the RSA New Contemporaries exhibition in 2013."
Madeline also won the Young and Wild Category at the 2012 David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation Wildlife Artist of the Year competition, and the 'Black and White Nature' category in the BBC Wildlife Artist of the Year competition.
She has just found out that three of her prints have made it through to the next round of judging for the prestigious Neo Print Prize, and she will be exhibiting in the Autumn Exhibition at the Moncrieff-Bray Gallery, Sussex, in October.
Madeline's previous awards include the 2011 Woodland Trust prize, resulting in a sculpture commission for cast bronze birds for the Moncrieff Hill Woodlands, and the Timothy Greenwood Wildlife Artists Memorial Competition.
The prize for this latter award was a two-week trip to Nepal to produce works inspired by the landscape, people, plants and wildlife there.
More examples of her work can be found at www.madelinemackay.portfoliobox.net.
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