NEWS RELEASE: Award-winning filmmaker presented with 2022 Foulis Medal

November 2, 2022
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Sofia Mellander, winner of the 2022 Foulis Medal

 

  • Sofia Mellander awarded the medal for top graduating Masters student for her audio-visual pieces examining what on earth is happening to us in cyberspace.

  • Keynote address given to graduating students by award-winning writer, performer and theatre maker, Travis Alabanza


The Royal Television Award award-winning film maker, musician and sound artist, Sofia Mellander (aka Salt), has been presented with the 2022 Foulis Medal today, 3 November 2022. The medal, which is awarded to the top student on a taught Masters programme at the GSA, was presented at Winter Graduation in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. Top students in the five Schools were meanwhile awarded Chairman’s Medals: Wattana Songpetchmongkol, (MArch Architectural Studies), Len Goetzee (MLitt Fine Art), Dan Hou, (MDes Fashion & Textiles), Mariana Acosta Morales, (MDes Design Innovation & Service Design) and Monika Keenan, (MSc Heritage Visualisation)

 

 “Today we are joined by family and friends to celebrate the success of our wonderful postgraduate students,” says Professor Penny Macbeth, Director of The Glasgow School of Art. “This group of talented practitioners has produced fascinating and ground-breaking bodies of work during their time at the GSA, much of it addressing the fundamental issues that we face today and challenging how we relate to the world around us.

 

 “They now join our global Creative Network of alumni who are applying their innovative thinking and creativity across many different disciplines and sectors, making an invaluable contribution to society and the economy both at home and abroad. We look forward to seeing their professional practices develop and wish them every success in their future endeavours.”

 

Foulis Medal awardee, Sofia Mellander, who won a Royal Television Award for her short film, Without Christina in 2018, graduated from the GSA with an Master of Design in Sound for the Moving Image. Her Postgraduate Degree Show project – Control my Bodliless Form – is a satirical and absurd look at the “numbness, joy, and horror” that exists online. Following a call-out for people to share their cyber experiences (anonymously) she not surprisingly received many recounting experiences of grooming, doxxing, antisemitism, stalking, trolling, homophobia, racism, and self-harm, but there were also stories of finding community, inspiration, creativity, even romantic love. Sofia wove these experiences into three audio-visual pieces, examining what on earth is happening to us in cyberspace.

 

“Sofia Mellander’s practice brings together the unlikely pairing of Swedish folk music and social media, combining the two in a trilogy of short performance films: Control My Bodiless Form,” says Ronan Breslin. “The work is in turns amusing, absurd, and darkly disturbing. In merging two culturally and aesthetically diverse concepts. She has created a satirical and utterly beguiling set of music videos that modernize the folk music genre, through subverting the conventions of sound and story-telling often found within it.”

 

Image: Ann Priest, Chair of the GSA, keynote speaker Travis Alabanza
and GSA Director, Professor Penny Macbeeth

The keynote address to the graduating students was given by the award-winning writer, performer and theatre makerTravis Alabanza who was the youngest recipient of the artist in residency program at Tate Galleries and who featured in the influential Forbes30Under30List. Alabanza spoke to the graduating students about forming their own paths in creative industries, and shared thoughts on community impactful work.

 

Ends

 

For further information contact:

Lesley Booth

07799414474

press@gsa.ac.uk

 @GSofAMedia


Notes for Editors


  • The Foulis Medal is named in honour of Robert Foulis the printer who together with his brother Andrew established the Academy which has been described as ‘the single most influential factor in the development of eighteenth-century Scottish Art’. The GSA’s lineage can be traced back to the Foulis Academy.

 

  • Travis is a writer, performer and theatre maker from Bristol. Their writing, performance and public discourse centres on trans and Black identities. For stage, Travis wrote and performed in their debut show Burgerz which won the Total Theatre Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as well as selling out venues including Southbank Centre and Traverse Theatre. The show has also toured in The Netherlands and the US. It was also voted one of The Guardian Readers Top Shows of The Year and is published by Oberon Books. Their play Overflow, which premiered at and streamed from The Bush, was met with critical acclaim including numerous four-star reviews and was shortlisted for the George Devine Award. Their book, None of the Above was published in August 2022 to critical acclaim. Travis currently has a new show for stage in development with the Southbank Centre, Hackney Showrooms and their mum and their original comission Sound of the Underground will premiere as part of the Royal Court’s new season in 2023. Travis’ work has also appeared on BBC Front Row, The Verb and in 2019 they hosted their first radio documentary ‘Going to The Gay Bar’ for BBC Radio Four.

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