Art prize for student

A University of St Andrews student has received a major art prize.

Nuala Watt (20), an English and creative writing student, has been awarded £5,000 for her role in an exhibition at the Royal College of Art. The prize has been awarded in conjunction with her mother Liz Munro, a former lecturer in textiles at Glasgow School of Art.

The Sense and Sensuality exhibition is the brainchild of BlindArt, a charity that encourages the participation and interaction of the visually impaired in the sighted domain of the visual arts.

Liz decided to embark upon a series of prints celebrating her daughter’s creativity and exploring how the visually impaired experience the world.

Her print, Head, depicts a girl wearing a red hat and black shirt. The head is blurred and the red from the hat has bled, covering her eyes. The pattern on the shirt is in sharp detail and is deliberately tactile. Nuala’s accompanying poem, Birdsong, which also appears in braille, is about the expressive modes open to her as a disabled artist and the isolation she felt as an adolescent also coping with cerebral palsy and limited sight.

Nuala said, “Art for the visually impaired tends to be about getting us to appreciate what sighted people see. I’m curious about that but it’s difficult to explain because you don’t know what I see. I’m trying to show disability as a positive and legitimate alternative artistic vision”.

The mother and daughter duo plan to use the prize, recently presented by Estelle Morris MP, Minister for the Arts, to fund a more ambitious multi-sensory work, involving Nuala’s younger sister Vari.

ENDS

Issued by Beattie Media On behalf of the University of St Andrews For more information – or to arrange to talk to Nuala – please contact Gayle Cook, Press Officer – 01334 467227, 07900 050 103, [email protected] Ref: press releases/nuala View the latest University news at http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk