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Northern Art Prize

Alec has been shortlisted for the Northern Art Prize. An exhibition featuring the 4 nominees will be presented at Leeds Art Gallery, 26 November 2010 – 6 February 2011. The judges are: Richard Greer, Susan Hiller, Mark Lawson, Andrea Rose and Tanja Pirsig-Marshall. The winning artist will be announced on 20 January 2010.

Alec’s field of model windmill turbines featured in the keynote exhibition ‘all art is, is rhythmn’, and an adshell version of the sky-wheel was presented in Sunderland, during the acclaimed 2010 AV Festival, this March.

Potentially the largest public art work in the UK, white peak | dark peak, a permanent re:place commission by Alec and a team of poets, was launched in the Peak District this Easter. The project is an audio | visual word-map of the Peak District National Park, with over 70 poem-views and 20 letterboxes. Collaborators include Linda France, Geraldine Monk and Alan Halsey, with field-recordings by Bevis Bowden. A catalogue is now available from the bookshop.

A companion project, the road north, creating a word-map of Scotland, is now underway. A collaboration between Alec and Ken Cockburn, this was awarded a Vital Spark Award in March 2010; on May 16 Alec and Ken began the journey, guided through their homeland by Matsuo Basho’s Oku-no-Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North). Traveling for a year, Alec and Ken will visit 53 locations, recording their journey on a blog, and on May 16, 2011, 53 poem word maps will be published. Their first destinations included Falkland, Jupiter Artland and Bharpa Langais, and they are about to explore Perthshire.

Other current projects include a letterbox walk in Langais Forest, North Uist, mapping the woodland in terms of biodiversity, in partnership with Taigh Chearsabhagh; a new school’s project exploring the potential of habitat and outdoor learning at Hilton Primary School, Newcastle; and a Home to a King (3) nest-box installed at Timespan (Helmsdale).