Royal Scottish Academy

Barns-Graham Travel Award for any student graduating from Scotland’s four art colleges, regardless of age, working in the fields of sculpture, painting or printmaking.  

• The 2010 Barns-Graham Travel Award has been given to Geri Loup Nolan who has completed a research trip to Japan. In addition to winning this award Geri has also been selected to exhibit at the RSA New Contemporaries Exhibition in 2011. Her statement of her travels is to be found here.
  
  
• 2009 Martin Hill
  Hill’s work is based upon ancient mythology and so he visited Greece to look at sites of antiquity related to ancient texts. His statement of his travels is to be found here.
  
  
• 2008 Gemma Saville – visiting Iceland for her project.
  “The experience was amazing. I saw such a range of fantastic landscapes from turquoise water to black sand beaches to glaciers, and travelled to some spectacular sights. I stayed in an apartment in Reykjavik for the first part of the trip, using it as a base to travel to some of the more famous sights in Iceland. From Reykjavik I went to Geysir to see the active hot springs and I travelled to the Gullfoss waterfall where I was able to stand on the edge of the rocks and see the turquoise green water up close. I also went to Pingvellir which is the site of the first parliament and is also where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates meet to form the Mid-Atlantic ridge - at this point the two pieces of land on which you stand are actually moving away from each other at a rate of 40mm per year!
  
  For the second half of the trip I toured up the West Coast. I stopped off at Borgarnes, a small coastal peninsula town that stretched out into the Atlantic Ocean. I then travelled further north to Stykkisholmur, a colourful harbour town surrounded by glaciers. From Styykisholmur I travelled by ferry to a small island called Flatey, close to the West Fjords, an island which has only 4 permanent inhabitants and which was a very tranquil place mainly occupied by a great range of birds.
  
  I have added a couple of new images to my blog just to show a couple of the beautiful places I visited. (www.gemmasaville.blogspot.com) But I am just now considering how I would like to document the trip as a whole and collate some of the fantastic images I managed to collect whilst in Iceland, as well as consider how I want to develop my own practice in response to this.”
  
  
• 2007 Mair Hughes – visited key European sites of interest in the history of Process Art and Arte Povera 2008