North East art prize finalists announced ahead of Seaton Delaval Hall exhibition

The North East Emerging Artist Award will show the finalists’ proposals in an exhibition at the National Trust’s Seaton Delaval Hall this summer and visitors will be able to vote for their favourite.

Newcastle University Fine Art graduates Iris Oliver, Phoebe Scott, Bethany Stead, and Lucy Waters are among the finalists, all of whom are early career artists.

The rest of the finalists are sculptor Jordan Edge, Newcastle University student Suze Terwisscha van Scheltinga from the Netherlands, Chris Thompson from Middlesbrough, and Debbie Todd from County Durham.

The exhibition will be held at the hall’s Georgian stables from 15 May to 23 June, and will include the completed work by 2023’s award winners.

The prize is open to applications involving any and all art forms, including music and sound, theatre, film, fashion, literature, and design, as well as fine art.

Its aim is to showcase site specific contemporary art in an historic context and to encourage emerging artists to be inspired by Seaton Delaval Hall.

The prize is run as a collaboration between the National Trust and art curator Matthew Jarratt in celebration of the patronage of the arts that Seaton Delaval Hall’s historic occupants were famous for.

This included commissioning painter Arthur Pond to produce views of the hall and supporting erotic novelist John Clelland and artist William Bell. The Delaval family, known at the time as the ‘Gay Delavals’, were also notorious Georgian partygoers and pranksters.