Kate Davis Announced as Recipient of 2016/2017 Margaret Tait Award

The recipient of the 2016/​2017 Margaret Tait Award is Glasgow-based artist Kate Davis. Shortlisted along with artists Aideen Doran, Hardeep Pandhal, Catherine Street and Stina Wirfelt, Davis will receive a £10,000 commission to create a new piece of work, and the opportunity to present this work at Glasgow Film Festival in 2017.

Davis’ 2014 work Weight was produced as part of the Artists and Archives: Artists’ Moving Image at the BBC residency programme, supported by BBC Scotland, LUX and Creative Scotland. Taking a 1961 BBC documentary about Barbara Hepworth as its starting point, Weight explores how televised depictions of creativity constructed our understanding of artistic production and other forms of labour.

On winning the 2016 Margaret Tait Award, Davis said, ​‘Working with the moving image has become an increasingly important part of my practice in recent years and the Margaret Tait Award will be invaluable in enabling me to realise my most ambitious and experimental moving image work to date. Inspired by the ways in which Margaret Tait’s films invite us to contemplate fundamental emotions and everyday activities that are often overlooked, I propose to investigate how the essential, but largely invisible and unpaid, processes we employ to care for others and ourselves can inform both the subject of my film and the way it is made.’

Born in New Zealand, Kate Davis lives and works in Glasgow. Previous projects include Cinenova Presents Now Showing, LUX Cornwall, St Ives; Artists and Archives: Artists’ Moving Image at the BBC; GENERATION, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; HOUSE WORK CASTLE MILK WOMAN HOUSE, Glasgow Women’s Library; Art Under Attack, Tate Britain. Forthcoming projects include a solo exhibition at Stills, Edinburgh.

The 2016 panel consisted of a diverse range of experts and curators in the field of visual arts and cinema, including Kirsten Body (Inverness Museum and Art Gallery), Sophia Hao (Cooper Gallery, Dundee), Paul Pieroni (GoMA, Glasgow), Gayle Meikle (artist/​curator), Emma Nicolson (ATLAS Arts, Skye), Laura Simpson (Hospitalfield Arbroath), Stephen Sutcliffe (artist and previous Margaret Tait Award winner), Mark Thomas (Creative Scotland), Luke Collins (LUX Scotland) and Jane Hartshorn (Glasgow Film). 21 prominent Scottish artists were nominated for the award, and five were then shortlisted and asked to submit proposals, from which Davis was selected.