Winner Announced for the MaxMara Art Prize for Women in Collaboration with the Whitechapel

Iwona Blazwick, Director of the Whitechapel Gallery and Chair of the MaxMara Art Prize for Women, has announced artist Hannah Rickards as the winner of the prize.

The winner Hannah Rickards (b.1979) is the youngest of the short listed nominees. She was born and lives in London where she completed a BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins School of Art in 2002. Rickards’ sound installations translate a sound or occurrence in nature, re-interpreting it back into language or music.

Hannah Rickards was nominated for work including Birdsong, 2002 and Thunder, 2005. In Birdsong, 2002, Rickards recorded songs from six different birds, before lowering the pitch and replicating them with her own voice. In Thunder, 2005, commissioned by Media Art Bath for the Central United Reformed Church in Bath, she stretched an eight second recording of a thunderclap to eight minutes. The score was then transcribed by composer David Murphy to a musical score for six instruments, recorded and then reduced back to the length of the original thunderclap.

Hannah Rickards, winner of the second MaxMara Art Prize for Women comments “I am very pleased to be offered the chance to spend time on my work in Italy, and I very much look forward to having the opportunity of that time and space to develop my work further.”


3/26/2008