The Trustees were delighted to share the 2022 Prize between Kinga Elliott and Lauren Ferguson. Both are graduates of Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen.

Kinga Elliott

Kinga graduated with a First Class BA(Hons) Painting degree. She has won the RGU Arts and Heritage Purchase Prize for Fine Art 2020 and is the recipient of the J. Gordon Brown Memorial Painting Prize 2020. She has been awarded the prestigious RSA John Kinross Travel Scholarship 2020 to Florence. Her works are shortlisted for the Visual Arts Scotland Graduate Showcase 2020. She is the winner of the SCPN Art & Design Prize for Creative Communication, Scotland 2019. She was born in Budapest, and lives and works in Glenesk, Scotland.

Kinga Elliott is a visual artist predominantly making abstract mixed media works. Her practice focuses on the notion of interconnectedness, conscience, and complexity. She has a long-held interest in the concept of light.

As part of the artistic exploration into the nature of light, she found a very apt process in the making of cyanotypes, where light plays an active part in the creation of the image.

She has developed a unique way of making semi-transparent paper transparencies that serve as negatives for the cyanotype process. The resulting large paper cyanotypes then become starting points for further painterly developments. She uses oil and acrylic paint, ink, and various dry mediums in her creative process. Sometimes she mounts the cyanotype onto board, creating a tough surface that enables her to build up several layers of resin coatings with layers of paints between them.

Graduating during the Covid19 pandemic, her chosen titles for the paintings bear references to coding systems of online platforms she used creating her virtual exhibition space for the digital degree show. Elliott’s seemingly random word combinations evoke a sense of atmosphere and musicality.

Lauren Ferguson: Photography by Julie Howden

Lauren Ferguson

Lauren is a visual artist from Edinburgh and in 2020 graduated with a First Class BA Honours Degree in Painting. Lauren returned to Edinburgh as she was selected for Artist in Residence with Leith School of Art 20/21. In 2020, Lauren was awarded the RGU Arts and Heritage Purchase Prize with her drawings selected for the permanent collection. Lauren has exhibited locally and internationally in solo and selected group shows, which include Wells Art Contemporary 2021 and The Royal Scottish Academy Annual Exhibition 2021. Lauren is currently Artist in Residence at George Watson’s College.

Derived from a sense of place, Lauren’s practice has developed through an in-depth exploration of the history, architecture and associated objects in areas with which she has a personal connection. Through drawing and painting, Lauren develops open narratives about these places by considering individual, collective and social memories. She is interested in the connections between these memories, the historic architecture and their relationship to the surrounding landscape.
She writes: “Notions of deep mapping and psychogeography are integral methodologies within my research which have allowed me to develop a deeper and new found awareness for these places. Psychogeography has brought a new way of forming an intimate relationship with places from my childhood by finding the banal, the ordinary and even the strange with a new perspective of what already exists. Drawing has become a crucial way of articulating these ideas within my practice and a realism echoes through my work, emphasising the uncanny nature of everyday objects and architecture.
“The process of making has become important; with repeated patterns, endurance and erasure being a way of challenging my drawings and paintings. Ideas begin on location through sketchbook drawings which then expand into larger media through graphite or mixed media painting.”