Helen Marten has been awarded the 2016 Turner Prize. According to the BBC, the artist intends to share the £25,000 award (about $31,500) with her fellow nominees. Including Marten, women accounted for three of the four artists shortlisted for the honor.
Launched in 1984, the Turner Prize is one of the most well-known and prestigious visual arts prizes. Only artists under 50 are eligible for the honor, which celebrates those considered to have put on the best exhibition of the past year. “Marten was nominated for projects including Lunar Nibs at the 56th Venice Biennale and her solo exhibition Eucalyptus Let Us In at Greene Naftali in New York,” BBC reports.
Marten’s works incorporate sculpture, screen printing, and writing, and she “brings together a range of handmade and recognizable objects from everyday life in her installations,” BBC writes. Marten’s art on display at the Tate Britain in London include pieces made from snooker chalk, bicycle chains, and marbles. “A lot of people look at my work and think it’s an amalgam of junk, like a granny’s attic,” Marten has said.
The youngest on the shortlist, Marten said she “wasn’t expecting” the honor, and emphasized that she couldn’t think of “a more brilliant and exciting shortlist of artists to be part of.”
The jury praised Marten’s work, and described it as “outstanding for its extraordinary range of materials and form” and said “the work is like reading very rich, very enjoyable, very elusive, quite enigmatic poetry — rather than a very clear report on what happened in a newspaper.”
Marten won the inaugural Hepworth Prize earlier this month, given in recognition of an artist for their work in contemporary sculpture. The amazingly generous Marten plans to share the money from that award — £30,000, or about $38,000 — with her fellow nominees as well.
Check out photos of Marten’s work, and her fellow nominees’, over at the BBC.
Watch a video of Marten discussing her artistic process below.