Duncan Marquiss Announced as Recipient of 2015/2016 Margaret Tait Award

The recipient of the 2015 Margaret Tait Award is Glasgow-based artist Duncan Marquiss. Shortlisted along with artists Kathryn Elkin, Rob Kennedy, and Hardeep Pandhal, Marquiss 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 2016.

Of the prize, Marquiss said, ​‘The Margaret Tait Award is very significant to me at this time as it will allow me to make a film that I would not be able to otherwise realise, and is also a big encouragement for me to keep making work in future. I’m humbled to receive it as all of the shortlisted artists are excellent. With the commission I plan to make a film exploring analogies between natural evolution and the evolution of music. Provisionally entitled Evolutionary Jerks and Gradualist Creeps; Playing the Fossil Record, the film will also focus on a debate between two competing models of evolution and the political ideologies that underpin them.’

Marquiss graduated from the MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 2005 and undertook the LUX Associate Artist Programme in 2009. Recent projects include ​‘Foraging Economics’, published in The Happy Hypocrite #7: Heat Island, Book Works, 2014; Flatness: Cinema After The Internet, International Kurzfilmtage, Oberhausen, 2013; Information Foraging, Artists’ Moving Image Festival, Tramway, Glasgow, 2013; Noise, Unosunove Rome, 2012; and Secret Societies, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 2011.

The 2015 panel consisted of a diverse range of experts and curators in the field of visual arts and cinema, including Mason Leaver-Yap (LUX Scotland Project Director), Mark Thomas (Creative Scotland), Jenny Brownrigg (Glasgow School of Art), Sarah Neely (University of Stirling), Laura Simpson (Hospitalfield), Ben Harman (Stills), Susan Christie (Inverness Old Town Art), Andrea Kusel (Paisley Museums Curator of Art), and Sean Greenhorn (Glasgow Film). 24 prominent Scottish artists were nominated for the Award, and four were then shortlisted and asked to submit proposals, from which Marquiss was selected.