BURSARIES, GRANTS & SCHOLARSHIPS

The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust supports a range of bursaries, grants and scholarships to assist art and art history students at selected educational institutions. To date the Trust has funded students at:

Edinburgh College of Art : first degree
Glasgow School of Art : support in Year 1 in first degree
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee : hardship funding
Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen : hardship funding
University College, Falmouth : first degree
St. Andrews University : Postgraduate

The Trust also offers an annual travel scholarship to an artist early in their career, administered through the Royal Scottish Academy.

New bursaries and grants to begin at the start of the 2009/10 academic year are with:

Edinburgh University : A 5 Year degree programme, half studio based and half devoted to academic history and theory, which is taught jointly by the University Of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art.

We are delighted that the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust has offered to award two £1000 bursaries each year to students on the five-year Fine Art programme in Edinburgh. The degree has been running for 60 years, taught jointly by the History of Art Department at the University and Edinburgh College of Art. It has produced many distinguished artists, art historians and arts administrators (John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland; Ian Howard and Andrew Patrizio, respectively Principal and Research Director, Edinburgh College of Art; Matthew Gale, Senior Curator, Tate Modern, to name but a few). The bursaries will support travel to view specific exhibitions, collections, archives, or buildings, undertaken in the summer vacation between 4th and 5th years, which will greatly enhance the 10,000 word dissertations that students write in their final year, alongside working on their final Degree Shows.
Leeds University : Masters degree in Fine Art – intended for Printmaking
The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art : The Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Research Support Grant will be awarded annually to a scholar or researcher in the field of 20th Century British painting. The grant is for £2,000 to assist with travel, subsistence and other research costs and will be administered by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Details of the award will be found on the Fellowships and Grants pages of their website at www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk and the closing date for applications will be 15 September each year.

The successful candidate for 2009 is John Curley of Wake Forest University who is continuing his research on ‘The Art that Came in from the Cold: Painting, Photography and Cold War Visuality’.
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee : supporting a Fine Art student through PhD by practice.

Two new travel scholarships to help enable art and art history students to visit Italy have been made available for graduates and for those graduating from Edinburgh College of Art and University College Falmouth.

Please be aware that The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust does not accept applications directly. These awards are administered by the colleges and universities cited above, and the candidates selected by and from their art and art history departments.

Please address all enquires to Matilda Mitchell via email to info@barns-grahamtrust.org.uk

Edinburgh College of Art

Christopher Bryant who has graduated with 1st Class Honours. Examples of his work can be seen here. He will be continuing for a further year to complete his Masters Degree.

University College Falmouth

Laura Culham who has graduated with 1st Class Honours. Laura will be starting a postgraduate course in printmaking at the Royal College of Art, London, in September. Her work can be seen on her web site at www.lauraculham.co.uk
Leila Watts who has graduated with 2.1 Honours. Leila has returned to her home town of Brighton and is starting a new body of work to exhibit in 2010. Click on Statement to read her artist’s statement and Relentless Clouds of Green and Died 12th December 2007 to see images. Her web site, which she is currently updating, is www.leilawatts.com
The Travel to Italy Award 2009 has been won by Jasmine Pajak. Jasmine graduated from the BA Fine Art course this year and is aiming to travel to Italy to investigate the mask and unmasking of self, with specific reference to the representation of women, via the masked theatre of commedia dell’arte and the soap opera of contemporary Italian television.

Glasgow School of Art

The Balmungo Scholarship goes to a student in first year. The 2008/2009 recipient was Roger Catalano who has successfully completed his first year in Silversmithing and Jewellery.
We are pleased to announce that the 2009 recipient of the Balmungo Scholarship is Mhairi Tavendale

University of St Andrews

2007 Anna Sandaker Glomm successfully completed her PhD ‘A Comparative Study of early 1970s Political Poster Art in Scandinavia – GRAS, Folkets Atelier and Røde Mor’.
2009 Michelle Huang is currently completing her thesis on ‘The Reception of Chinese Art in Early Twentieth Century Britain, with Special Reference to Laurence Binyon’.
2009/10 A travel assistance grant has been awarded to Kirstin Donaldson (for a M.Litt), to aid with her research on British Surrealism and Modernism.”

Royal Scottish Academy - Barns-Graham Travel Award

2007 Mair Hughes – visited key European sites of interest in the history of Process Art and Arte Povera 2008
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.”
2009 Martin Hill
Hill’s work is based upon ancient mythology and so he will be visiting Greece to look at sites of antiquity related to ancient texts.

University of Leeds

2009 The recipient for the award that assists a student in printmaking is Jessica Laljee.