Glasgow-based artist Duncan Marquiss has been announced as the winner of the 2015 Margaret Tait Award by Glasgow Film Festival.
Marquiss will receive a £10,000 commission to create a new piece of work, and the opportunity to present this work at Glasgow Film Festival in 2016.
Supported by Creative Scotland and LUX, the award - named after the experimental Orcadian filmmaker - was founded in 2010 to support experimental and innovative artists working within film and moving image.
Duncan Marquiss graduated from the MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 2005 and undertook the LUX Associate Artist Programme, London in 2009. Recent projects include ‘Foraging Economics’, published in The Happy Hypocrite #7: Heat Island, Book Works, 2014; Flatness: Cinema After The Internet, International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen 2013; Information Foraging, Artist Moving Image Festival Tramway, Glasgow 2013; Noise, Unosunove Rome, 2012; and Secret Societies, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 2011.
There were originally 24 artists in the running for the award and the other shortlisted artists were Kathryn Elkin, Rob Kennedy, and Hardeep Pandhal.
The panel said: "While all four proposals were deeply compelling and had aspects that fully recommend them, the panel was unanimous in its choice of Duncan Marquiss' proposal. Duncan's ideas conveyed an enthusiasm that came off the page with imagination and immediacy.
"This well-considered proposal clearly embraced the opportunity and transformative ambition that the Margaret Tait Award offers, while also showing the artist's detailed investment in every aspect of the moving image work he hoped to produce – from the soundtrack to the diverse subjects he hopes to explore and represent. The freshness of this thinking, backed by a practice that has continued to evolve a generous and engaging visual language of its own, will undoubtedly bring about an innovative and thoughtful film for the 2015 Margaret Tait Award."
Marquiss said: "The Margaret Tait Award is very significant to me at this time as it will allow me to make a film that I would not be able to otherwise realise, and is also a big encouragement for me to keep making work in future. I'm humbled to receive it as all of the shortlisted artists are excellent.
"With the commission I plan to make a film exploring analogies between natural evolution and the evolution of music. Provisionally entitled Evolutionary Jerks and Gradualist Creeps; Playing the Fossil Record, the film will also focus on a debate between two competing models of evolution and the political ideologies that underpin them."
