John Ruskin Prize 2019: Selectors

Manchester Met's Tim Brennan and Rachel Dickinson are two of the Selectors for the John Ruskin Prize for Art.

The prestigious John Ruskin Prize for Art ceremony is being hosted at the Holden Gallery as part of this year's Festival of Ruskin in Manchester.  

The shortlist of 25 artists, designers and makers will have their selected works exhibited at The Holden Gallery, Manchester in a high profile exhibition from 12 July - 24 August 2019.

Now in its 5th year, The John Ruskin Prize 2019 aims to uphold Ruskin’s beliefs whilst challenging the nation’s creatives to consider their role as catalysts of change, critics, social and political commentators and material innovators. Open to a broad range of interpretations, the prize organisers are inviting entries from a range of creative practitioners in response to the theme: ‘Agent of Change’.

Professor Tim Brennan is Head of Art at Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is an artist who has exhibited for 30 years. His concerns lie in the area of art’s politicized relationship to space, place, writing, photography, archives and performance. Brennan’s doctorate focused upon the methodology he developed surrounding the use of the guided walk to investigate our relations to place and history in new and imaginative ways.

Dr Rachel Dickinson is the Director for Education of the Guild of St George, the charity founded by John Ruskin in 1871.  A Principal Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, she teaches English literature from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her primary research interest is John Ruskin.  Initially, this related to her PhD from Lancaster University on letters by Ruskin, which gave rise to an edited collection: John Ruskin’s Correspondence with Joan Severn: Sense and Nonsense Letters (Legenda 2008).  In addition to publishing on Ruskin, she has given many lectures on him, been interviewed about him by BBC Radio 4 and Radio Scotland, and curated an exhibition ‘ “Teaching Silkworms to Spin”: John Ruskin and the Ethics of Textiles’ (Ruskin Library, Lancaster University 2013).  Her current research interest is in Ruskin and textiles, and in how Ruskin envisaged sustainable living during the nineteenth century and how this can be reinterpreted for the twenty-first century in areas such as art, business management, crafts, ethical consumerism, museum curation, and even farming and land management.