The Christine Risley Award Winner 2020: Tyreis Holder

The Goldsmiths Textile Collection and Constance Howard Gallery are delighted to announce the 2020 Christine Risley Award Winner as BA Art graduate, Tyreis Holder.

Due to the postponement of degree shows this year the award was judged from online submissions. The entries were a testament to the resilience shown by the student population during this difficult time and the judges were particularly impressed by the strength of Tyreis Holder’s practice which explores self-identity and her own ‘trilogy of cultures’ through the language of textiles and clothing.  

In the words of the guest judge, Rose Sinclair, ‘these works are rooted sensitively within ideas based around a divided self, and the relationship between textile and the body, textiles and text, and text and orality, describing the emergence of an identity.’   

With roots in black music, poetry and textiles, Tyreis translates her own poetry into textile pieces, installations and performances. In ‘IDK, I’m calling this Midnight hue, or suttin like dat’ (2019), commissioned by local arts festival Deptford X, she creates a site of healing in response to the systemic oppression of black women. The choice to leave garments unfinished or unhemmed reflects the nature of her mother tongue, Patois (translated as ‘rough speech’) and conveys a narrative that the artist describes as existing ‘freely on a continuum, with no ending or fullstop’. Rose Sinclair notes that ‘there is the connection throughout between the historical narrative of textile seen through the artefact of 'crochet' in the Caribbean space and artefact of 'patois' both tracers of moments and embodied practices of self-identity.’  

This year we would also like to offer a Highly commended award to BA Art Graduate, Corinne (Shih-Yen) Chan whose uncanny performance works capture the imagination with their reference to ecological endeavours in a posthuman world.  

Guidelines for submission 

Learn more about Goldsmiths’ Textile Collection and the Constance Howard Gallery.

About Christine Risley 

The Christine Risley Award is open to any final year undergraduate student currently enrolled in the Art or Design Departments at Goldsmiths. The prize acknowledges the diversity and plurality of contemporary textile practice.  Work must be practice-based / creative but may encompass any media. 

A textile artist, Christine Risley (1926–2003) was a key member of Constance Howard’s remarkable and innovative department of textiles, where she set up the machine embroidery area in the 1960s and published a series of books on embroidery. She saw herself as a modern woman, encouraging her students to be adventurous in both work and life.