Edith Skeard (centre) receiving the Audain Award
Congratulations go out to Visual Arts MFA candidate Edith Skeard on being named one of five BC graduate students to receive a $7,500 Travel Award from the Audain Foundation on Sept 26. As a complement to the prestigious $100,000 Audain Prize (this year awarded to BC-based Dane-Zaa sculptor Brian Jungen), the Audain Travel Awards were established in 2019 to carve new pathways for student artists by supporting access to career-enriching international art experiences.
Skeard will use the award to travel to a month-long Sound Lab residency in Struer/Copenhagen for an exploration of sound art within a sculptural context.
“I feel very grateful to receive this award and very privileged to represent UVic at the Audain Prize,” says Skeard. “Denmark has a really vibrant experimental sound-art culture, and this residency is a way to deepen my practice within both sound and sculpture, and to pull my practice into an international space.”
Visual Arts chair Megan Dickie says, “Skeard produces multi-component installations with visual elements, sculpture, light and sound. They seek to create immersive environments that offer the viewer opportunities for transcendent experiences. In this work, the environment around us is transformed in ways that remind us that our own interpretations and experiences are like shadows of the real world.”
Skeard with Megan Dickie (left)
Edie Skeard is a multimedia artist, woodwind player, and composer working primarily within sound art and sculpture. Their work focuses on building installation spaces through the intersection of light, sound, people, duration and tactility.
They are interested in collecting and collaging field recordings and improvisational sound, how sound and light creates/erases spatial boundaries, contemporary sculpture, tenderly noticing their environment, future archives, dreams, and the weaving together of different sensory mediums. They engage playfully with materials to understand the relationships between sound and objects and their ontological implications.
Skeard is our seventh Visual Arts MFA student to receive an Audain Travel Award, and our ongoing partnership with the Audain Foundation also includes the rotating Audain Professorship in Contemporary Art Practice of the Pacific Northwest and our own contemporary Audain Gallery (established 2010).
Don’t miss Edith Skeard’s October 6-10 solo exhibit in the Visual Arts building’s Audain Gallery, with a public reception running 6-8pm Thursday, October 9.