The RURAL magazine Jersey Landscape Art Awards evening will take place at the CCA International art gallery, as part of its Summer Exhibition.
This year, the annual competition awards evening will take place on Friday 12 July, and the presentation of the awards will come at the end of an afternoon event themed around food security and seed saving.
There will also be a further prize competition, titled ‘Inspired by the Sea’, introduced by CCA International.
Both competitions will follow the same format as the RURAL Landscape Art awards over the past five years. Works of art that have been selected to be a part of the CCA Summer Exhibition, and which portray Jersey’s rural landscape or its surrounding seascape, will be judged separately by a team of local judges, and prizes awarded to the three winners of the landscape and seascape themed works of art.
The theme of both competitions is to acknowledge the inspiration that the Island’s landscape and seascape provides for artists and to encourage them to produce artwork inspired by nature.
Works can be in any medium but the Landscape competition must find inspiration in Jersey landscapes, its farming, food, animals, plants – in general, the natural world. Similarly, the seascape competition focusses on Jersey’s beaches and surrounding seas.
Deadline for submissions to the CCA Galleries International’s Jersey Summer Exhibition is 7 April.
The expansion of the Awards into a longer event has been inspired by the current concern about food security in an uncertain world. It will focus on saving the seeds of edible and useful plants, with demonstrations and hands-on practice at saving seeds from the main edible plant families, companion plants and wildflower pollinator attractors.
The editor of RURAL magazine, Alasdair Crosby, said: ‘The expansion of the Landscape competition reinforces the magazine’s emphasis on Jersey’s countryside, which is not only a worthy subject for artistic representation, but also an important source of food and health.’
Hosting the food and seed event is Laura Hudson, the gallery’s development manager, and environmentalist Sheena Brockie.
Laura is an artist and a horticulturist specialising in edible plants. She previously managed a smallholding in France producing open pollinated heirloom seeds of edible and useful plants for Association Kokopelli, the European distributor of biological seed. She has also written an edible gardening blog, Kitchen Garden Notebook.
She said: ‘Seeds are dynamic, they have a viability life span. We shall be demonstrating how to test if seeds remain viable. This is important so as to avoid wasting time and resources trying to sow seeds that are no longer viable.’
Sheena Brockie is a sustainability consultant who writes the local sustainability/nature connection blog, The Good Jersey Life. She is also the co-founder of Plastic Free Jersey and of Grow, the 13-vergée site in the heart of Jersey’s countryside that has been transformed into an organic, sustainable, multi-crop and educational site for the whole community. She is a recipient of the JEP Environmentalist of the Year Award.
The event will include demonstrations of seed saving techniques for each of the key plant families from which most of our food is derived. Visitors will also be shown how to make beautiful seed packets in which to store seeds.
The judges for both landscape and seascape competitions will be: David Benest, senior partner of BCR Law; Donna Le Marrec, marketing manager of the National Trust for Jersey; Valeria Riva, manager of CCA Art Gallery; Alasdair Crosby and Gary Grimshaw, respectively the publisher/editor of RURAL magazine and RURAL’s photographer.
The event will take place on Friday 12 July from 2pm. The presentation of the art competition awards will take place on that same evening at 6pm.
To find out more about CCA International’s Summer exhibition, visit their website – www.ccagalleriesinternational.com.
There is no charge, but please register via Eventbrite’s CCA page:
or e-mail enquiries@ccagalleriesinternational.com
