Soho House Art Prize, supported by Bombay Sapphire is a new global contemporary art prize to discover, recognise and support artistic talent. The inaugural prize was judged by a highly respected international judging panel including, Kate Bryan, Soho House Head of Collections; Maria Balshaw CBE, Director of Tate; and Hebru Brantley, artist and Bombay Sapphire Creator.
The winner – Scottish-Italian artist Sarah Hardie – has just created her commissioned new work, a symphonic-video-essay ‘Spring sometimes rises in me too’. Written throughout lockdown in 2020, it explores issues of love, desire, female experience and feminism. Inspired by Hardie’s own biography and the events of Summer 2020, the film explores the “marks” our mothers’ love and voice leaves on “us”, and the marks we leave on others and the earth around us.
I make art so others feel less alone when they experience it – Sarah Hardie
Spring sometimes rises in me too is a duet across time incorporating a practice tape of Hardie’s mother – who trained as a professional opera singer – recorded before the artist was born. The title of the film is taken from a line in Zadie Smith’s publication Intimations: Six Essays (also written throughout lockdown 2020), in which the writer discusses inevitable submission to nature. In Hardie’s work – she interrogates the resonance of mother’s voice in the child, its echoes and imprints: what is lost from one generation to another; what remains; and what, when cultivated, grows. The film is now publicly available to watch via www.sohohouse.com
Sarah Hardie (b.1988), a Scottish-Italian artist now lives and works in London. She has a research-based, performance art practice and is particularly interested in working with the voice, given its emotive and communicative potential. Sarah graduated with an MA (Hons) Fine Art from Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art, and then read MA History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She also works for Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London Hardie explores the interplay between voice and interpersonal relationships and has performed new commissions for Bold Tendencies and the V&A.
“The first Soho House Art Prize was launched with Bombay Sapphire at a moment of great uncertainty across the world. We hoped it might provide a source of inspiration and support to artists at a difficult moment. We were delighted, moved and motivated by the incredible applications we received, especially those of the runners up and our fantastic winner Sarah Hardie.” – Kate Bryan Soho House Head of Collections.
More about the Soho House Art Collection
The Soho House art collection is one of the largest private collections of its kind, with over 5000 art works on permanent display in Soho Houses across the globe – including work by museum level artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Lee Kit, Yinka Shonibare CBE, Nan Goldin, Oscar Murillo, Elmgreen and Dragset, Tacita Dean, Rashid Johnson, Jenny Holzer, Lynette Yiadom- Boakye, Deborah Roberts and Ed Ruscha, alongside younger and more emerging talent.
