Image Factory announces award winners
It’s the epicentre of Belize’s artistic explosion and today the Image Factory announced the winners of a competition that it hopes will mark the beginning of a tradition. News Five’s Marion Ali has the story from North Front Street.
Marion Ali, Reporting
These pieces were some of the over thirty submissions made in June for the Image Factory’s first art competition. The contest titled, “Wanted Creativity”, aimed to attract new blood or undeveloped talent in six different categories.
By the time the judging was complete, Alfonso Galvez of Clarissa Falls, Cayo topped the sculpting competition with this mahogany piece of a woman on one side and a man on the other. Manolo Daza of Dangriga took top honours in the multimedia category with this combination piece of a Garifuna drum and faces representing the different ethnic groups. Jon Ottly of Crooked Tree captured first prize for photography with these three photos of a wood cutter’s efforts on this tree. Curvin Mitchell of Sand Hill led the painting entries with this piece. He says the inspiration for his entry came from watching television.
Curvin Mitchell, artist
“I got the idea from Animal Planet from seeing the commercial with painted hands and the Toucan is relative to Belize so I do the toucan.”
Marion Ali
“Tell me a bit about the framing I notice it’s pretty unique. I haven’t seen anything like it.”
Curvin Mitchell
“Well I have a friend out in San Pedro who is a wood carver and he normally work with the driftwood and from him I got the idea of doing the driftwood frame.”
“I had to use my hands as the pattern to come up with it with all the details of my hand to come up with the details of the painting. I had to select the pieces of wood to do the framing. I had to go into the mangroves to get the pieces and select it.”
Gilvano Swasey, Curator, Image Factory Art Foundation
“ ‘Wanted Creativity’ the concept was to just basically give artists the total freedom to do what they want and that whole idea was something very new even though artists in Belize have been very free because we’ve been self-taught, but still there were always some kinda boundaries. You had to create works that will sell but most importantly as artists you want to create works that people would basically like. So the whole concept was for people, not only artists, to express themselves.”
Martha Audinette of Belize City won in the fabric and textiles category with her work of a flour bag.
But if these presentations look challenging to produce, Curator at the Image Factory and one of the judges, Gilvano Swasey, says selecting the winners was far from easy.
Gilvano Swasey
“It’s always because we know a lot of the artists, so again that becomes a bit of a challenge because you know people. But that also helped cause you knew what their potentials were, so we would have known well maybe we could have gone a little further in this medium with this artist because we have seen similar stuff. So it was kinda balanced in choosing and basically deciding who won and I think the artists will be happy and also we’re happy with what has turned out.”
Marion Ali for News Five.
