An 83-year-old artist from mid Wales has won one of the world’s most prestigious international art competitions.<\/p>\n
Yvonne Crossley from Llandrindod Wells, Powys, was awarded the \u00a315,000 Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, for her winning work Octogenarian Dancer.<\/p>\n
The suspended wire figure, made from used wire and fishing wire, captures a dancer’s poise without arms or legs, and is a celebration of what her body can still do in her 80s, Crossley said.<\/p>\n
“I’m on sticks, OK, I’ve got replacement hips, but I’m still, I’m still dancing,” she said.<\/p>\n
Crossley beat over 2,500 other entries by more than 1,400 artists from across 48 countries.<\/p>\n
Entrants could submit up to three works, drawn from an expanded definition of drawing that this year included Crossley’s wire and thread-based practice.<\/p>\n
Crossley deliberately left out arms and legs in her work “not for any destructive reason”, she said, “but because it’s enough that it dances without the whole figure”. <\/p>\n
“When I’ve made them where there’s a whole figure, they look more like dolls than they do dancers,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I’m in my 80s,” Crossley said, “and one of the things that I’m interested in is some kind of celebration of arriving at this point in life”.<\/p>\n
She acknowledged it was unusual for someone her age to win and said she hoped her win would challenge assumptions about who got to enter, and win, a major art prize.<\/p>\n
“It’s never over till it’s over,” she said.<\/p>\n
Selector Sook Kyung Lee, director of the Whitworth art gallery, said Crossley’s subject had been one that art had largely left alone.<\/p>\n
“We reside in a culture invested in youth, which maintains a vexed relationship with old age,” she said.<\/p>\n
“This work is about an ageing woman’s body, and how it changes through different stages.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An 83-year-old artist from mid Wales has won one of the world’s most prestigious international art competitions. Yvonne…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":774466,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-774465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=774465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/774466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=774465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=774465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=774465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}