Q&A with Last Year's Winner for Artwork in the Aesthetica Creative Works Competition

Don't forget, The Aesthetica Creative Works Competition closes for entries next Tuesday!

We’ve decided to catch up with last year’s Artwork Winner, Shadric Toop. His artwork, Alan, is a mixed media work, combining photomontage, varnish, stains, acrylic and oil paint as well as electrical wires and is the front cover image for last year's Creative Works Annual. The Artwork section is judged by Aesthetica editor, Cherie Federico, and last year's other winners were Louise Beech (Fiction, Judge, Rachel Hazelwood) and Sally Spedding (Poetry, Judge, Kate North). Read our Q&A with Louise here.

We wanted to catch up with Shadric and see what he’s been up to since winning the Artwork Category in 2009. Remember the deadline for this year's Competition is 31 August!

Q&A with Shadric Toop




You were born in 1971 but didn’t start making art works until around 2002. What promoted you to start creating art? Can you remember your first work?

I was (and still am) making my living as a graphic designer, and in 2002 I did a job for a local art gallery. The owner asked if I'd like to exhibit something. I'd done a collage for the book jacket of a psychological thriller called Fall and I got a kick out of seeing my work in a gallery, so I began making more personal work and occasionally exhibiting it.

Before you moved into making art, you were involved in architecture and graphic design. Do you feel that your background in these subjects has had an impact on the sort of work that you create?

I studied architecture, but only practiced it for a few months. I found it rigorous - it taught me how to organise my thoughts, how to draw and how to deal with multiple layers of meaning and sometimes conflicting goals. Ultimately I wasn't cut out for it because it was too dry for me. I was in the music business for a while, then fell into graphic design by accident. This suited me better and taught me many skills that I use in making art - from technical ones such as how to use Photoshop to formal ones such as dealing with visual language and composition. However, whilst I enjoy working as a graphic designer, making art is a kind of tonic. With graphic design, I am working to a brief, with the specific goal of selling products and it is refreshing to be able to create art free from these restrictions, that allows me to seek a truth, even if that truth is disappointing.

How would you say that your style has developed over the years? Have you been influenced by any particular artists?

A definite influence has been Frances Bacon, not just because his paintings are astonishing, experimental and deeply interesting but because I happen to identify with what he said about making art - that he doesn't know 'how' to make the images that he has in his head (he acknowledges the role of accidents, and that his work is a kind of selection process). And like me he didn't study art at college. I should also mention David Hockney, whose photography (rather than his painting) has influenced me. In his 'joiners' he experimented with collages of multiple images that have the effect of breaking away from the one-point perspective of the camera, while also embedding time and movement into his images.

Last year, you started a drawing blog (www.shadrictoop-drawingblog.co.uk). Can you explain a bit about why you decided to begin this project?

Drawing is important to me, and I sometimes teach drawing to foundation students. It occurred to me last year that I was a hypocrite because I advised my students to draw every day, and I didn't do it myself. So I started the blog as a kind of formal commitment to drawing every day. I've kept it up for 11 months so far, and it has been a fantastic exploration not just of drawing for drawing's sake but of ideas. I've got a backlog of ideas now, and I only wish I had the time to develop more of these ideas into larger projects. Time is my greatest enemy.

What advice would you give to other aspiring artists? Any tips on how to enter creative competitions?

Let me set something straight first of all: I am still an aspiring artist myself! However, I can offer some advice with an anecdote: I did enter another competition the year before, with the very same piece of work that eventually won Aesthetica Creative Works, and I didn't even get shortlisted in the first competition. I felt a bit disappointed, but when the Aesthetica competition came along, I thought I didn't have much to lose by entering, and I won. It was totally unexpected. So my advice would be don't give up just because you get rejections. There's plenty of retrospectively embarrassing rejections in the history of art.

Can you give us any insight into the projects that you are working on at the moment?

I'm moving away from portraiture at the moment. It is a larger project that I've been working on for over a year now, and it may end up being more of an installation. The starting point of this project was the tragic shooting of the innocent man Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station in London in 2005 by the British Police, which was the result of mistaken identity. This is just a starting point, with the wider themes being the connections between human warfare, violence and religion as well as chance, determinism and the fragility of existence. Sounds nice and cheerful eh?! The working title is 'Tube'. The work is nowhere near complete, and I don't have a show lined up yet but when I do I'll post it on my website.

New Prizes in the Aesthetica Creative Works Competition

The Aesthetica Creative Works Competition is drawing to a close soon so make sure that you enter before Tuesday 31st August if you want to participate!

The competition is dedicated to encouraging and supporting creative talent from across the disciplines and there are three categories in the competition: artwork & photography, poetry and short fiction.

As you know, the winner of each category receives £500 and the winners and finalists of each category are published in our Aesthetica Creative Works Annual. But that’s not all! In addition to this, we’ve managed to source some fantastic additional prizes for each of the winners and we wanted to share these with you.



First up is the extra prize for the Artwork & Photography winner. This is a beautiful selection of books from the art publisher, Prestel. Prestel have offered an amazing set of prizes; the mammoth sized Kandinsky collection is a particular favourite, offering a comprehensive study into the life and work of the famous Russian artist, but take a look at the other books we’re offering below:


Chuck Close: Life tells the inspiring story of one of the most important contemporary artists, chronicling Close’s determination and success at continuing to make art after a tragedy that left him almost completely paralysed from the neck down.

In The Ultimate Trophy: How the Impressionist Painting Conquered the World, Philip Hook, Senior Director of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art department, examines the public’s change of heart toward Impressionism. Drawn from Hook’s own experiences with art collectors and dealers, this fascinating chapter in art history is narrated through the lens of today’s art market and contains 79 illustrations.

Our fourth book in this selection is a retrospective book on illustrator Maira Kalman. For decades this brilliant artist has captured our hearts with her whimsical illustrations and engaged our minds with her trenchant observations and this collection is a wonderful celebration of a life dedicated to making art.

Last, but most definitely not least, is the excellent John Baldessari book, Pure Beauty. Packed to the brim with more than 150 of Baldessari’s works presented in full colour, it is a stunning publication. Eleven essays by critics, curators, art historians and former students round off this volume which was published in conjunction with a major exhibition at Tate Modern and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.


For the winner of the fiction category we’ve teamed up with Granta and Portobello to offer an astounding array of new and recent books, as well as a subscription to the excellent Granta magazine for the lucky winner. The books are below:

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart.
A brilliantly inventive, wildly funny and humane new novel, set in an economically and politically collapsed America, by the author of the bestselling Absurdistan. In a very near future a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse and Lenny Abramoc vows to convince his fickle new love that in a time without standards or stability, there is still value in being a real human being. Read our review of this book in the current issue of Aesthetica.

My Friend Jesus Christ by Lars Husum.
When Nick is 13, he loses his parents in a car-crash. His sister, seven years his elder, is left to look after him. As he grows up he cannot bear the thought of losing her protection and goes to extremes to retain her care and attention. An intruder in his flat convinces Nick, first, that he is Jesus Christ, and, second, that he must now take charge of Nick’s life.

Circus Bulgaria by Deyan Enev.
This new collection of tales masterfully encapsulates the zeitgeist of a post-communist society in all its weirdness and wonder. Drawing on the monsters and myths of Balkan folklore, the brutal reality of the Communist regime, and the dazzling magic of Enev’s own imagination, these stories have an almost hypnotic and surreal quality. Absurd, both painfully funny and deeply sad, Circus Bulgaria reaches straight into the cracked heart of Eastern Europe.

Are We Related: The New Granta Book of the Family ed. Liz Jobey,
Granta Books’ publication, in 1993, of Blake Morrison’s When Did You Last See Your Father heralded the huge rise in popularity of the literary memoir, and since then, Granta has carried pieces of non-fiction and fiction about the family from writers including Hanif Kureishi, Jackie Kay and Paul Theroux. The New Granta Book of the Family collects together a stunning variety of pieces about every member of the family.



Bloodaxe Books are offering an inspiring collection of poetry books for the winner of the poetry category.

Being Alive is the sequel to Neil Astley’s Staying Alive. Now Astley has assembled this equally lively companion anthology, filled with poems that touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit. Being Alive is about being human: about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder, bringing readers a wide selection of vivid, brilliantly diverse contemporary poetry from around the world.

Roddy Lumsden presents new British and Irish poetry at a time of great vibrancy and variety in Identity Parade: New British & Irish Poets. Eclectic, diverse and wide-ranging in scope, the book fully reflects the climate of “the pluralist now”. It offers the work of 85 highly individual and distinctive talents whose poems display the breadth of styles characteristic of our current poetry and many new poets appear alongside this generation’s most celebrated names.

Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century is a vibrant anthology introducing 21 of the most exciting young poets of the 21st century. Young editors, James Byrne and Clare Pollard set out to showcase the work of a talented new wave of poets from Britain and Ireland and to identify the best young poets of today. Their poems show a lively range of styles and subjects – sometimes sexy, sometimes dark, but consistently brimming with vitality. The future of poetry begins here.

Fleur Adcock was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry for her book Poems 1960 – 2000 but Dragon Talk is her first new collection for a decade. This collection continues to reflect her preoccupations with family matters and with her ambivalent feelings about her native New Zealand with her usual sardonic eye for incongruities and absurdities.

The fifth poetry book is TS Eliot Prize winner, The Water Table, by Philip Gross. A powerful body of water lies at the heart of these poems, with shoals and channels that change with the forty-foot tide. Philip Gross’s meditations move with subtle steps between these shifting grounds and those of the man-made world, the ageing body and that ever-present mystery, the self. Admirers of his work know each new collection is a new stage; this one marks a crossing into a new questioning, new clarity and depth.

Enter the Aesthetica Creative Works Competition now to be in with a chance of winning these fabulous collections! You can find out more information about the competition here. Last week we caught up with Louise Beech, who won the fiction category last year; read our interview with her here.

Review of Alex Bunn, Folk Form Taxa, at The Aubin Gallery, London

Review by Elisa Caldarola

Folk Form Taxa, Alex Bunn’s new show, opened last week at The Aubin Gallery in Shoreditch, London. Ten large light box pictures in a dark room confront and attract the viewer with saturated colours, compositional balance, captivating contrasts. They are often pictures of artefacts we are not accustomed to, the result of the artist’s experimentation with techniques and materials. Organic and inorganic are mixed and what looks like a colourful and sharply designed object reveals a more discomforting nature at a second inspection. Teeth, insects, a bat skull (or is it a mouse?), and what appear to be parts of the entrails of some larger animal are playfully assembled together with pieces of cloth, plastic, metal, silicon and other less easily discernible substances. A push and pull effect is an obvious consequence of the use of rather disgusting materials in images that remain nevertheless sexy.

Bunn’s photographs, however, aim to make a deeper point, and the attraction/repulsion dynamics is only one of the devices the artist puts into play in order to reach his goal. The exhibition leaflet mentions an interest in scientific methods, formal systems, classification, and in particular an epistemological concern with that which is left out by the process of scientific knowledge. Under this light Bunn’s photographs acquire a much broader variety of significance.



Bunn’s subjects are deliberately impenetrable, which enhances their power to fascinate and the feeling that, despite the efforts we put in understanding phenomena, there is always something that our categories miss out. For example, it is not at all clear what is going on among the junk, the electric cables and the toy-like object in the dramatically lighted An Ambivalent Incident (a title that speaks for itself). And what exactly is that metallic thing on a human tongue for (Cecocolic Chamber)? It looks possibly like a dentist’s instrument and yet not, and we can’t tell what it is used for. Nor we can say that it is an instrument of torture. Despite the uncomfortable subject, the image does not have a sadistic overtone and it does not repulse either. It is, first and foremost, an effective mechanism of displacement.

These pictures are comparable to still-life paintings where non-classifiable artefacts have replaced natural objects, and what is natural only appears in disguise (see especially Bruce Gordon, John Zoli Alcock and Falls Church Count Museum). Bunn has mixed the language of the natural and the artefactual to create an idiom that resonates, although we cannot properly grasp it. The images are also documents of an ambitious creative project: Bunn is a self-taught artist who keeps learning new techniques to produce the objects that populate his photographic sets. A single picture often is the final result of multiple work processes. He has also devised a special technique to photograph the objects from several points of view and then to digitally compose a unique image where no section looks out of focus. The result is an enhanced visual reality, another aspect in contrast with the inscrutable character of the photographed objects.

Bunn’s work is original, challenging and beautiful to look at. This is a small-scale exhibition that packs a surprising variety of themes.

www.aubingallery.com Until 5 September 2010

Images (c) Alex Bunn courtesy The Aubin Gallery
Feedback Ghost
An Ambivalent Incident