Donna Mann recently awarded the 2019 Emery Prize

NEWS |

Congratulations to Donna Mann who recently won the 2019 Emery Prize! This annual award celebrates and recognises the work from a final year Bachelor of Fine Art (BFA) or Master of Fine Art (MFA) student at the Ruskin School of Art.

Named after the founder of the Pembroke JCR Art Collection, Anthony Emery, the prize supports the freshest and most exciting artistic talent from the University of Oxford.

Donna recently completed her MFA at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Her work delves into the dynamics between human consciousness and the external environment, exploring the idea of self and alterity. While her practice moves between the medium of performance, installation and drawing, her thinking is consistently sculptural, compressing the physical action of creation into her paintings and object artwork. 

The committee were impressed by her interweaving of scientific concepts within her artwork, while maintaining the hand-crafted and painterly feel, with each moth in the central installation hand-cut and threaded into the sculptural form by the artist. Whilst human's create frameworks to dictate behaviour, Donna Mann's artwork reminds us to embrace the animalistic side of our character.

 Donna commented:

"Human beings are a very special kind of animal.  We are the architects of an ideological landscape, which creates the parameters for our own behaviour.  I am interested in the point where vision and ideology intersect - creating a lens through which perception is filtered, informing the judgements we make in regard to the human subject and other beings."

Donna’s solo exhibition will launch in October 2019 in partnership with PMB|ART. More details about the exhibition will be available soon.

To visit the JCR Art Gallery website, please click here.

For any further enquirires, please contact the JCR Art Gallery via jcr.artfund@pmb.ox.ac.uk