Congratulations to Gail Ritchie who has won the prestigious Homiens Art Prize.
The Homiens Art Prize is an international, non-acquisitive art prize open to all artists and art forms. It celebrates artists across all media, exhibiting their art online where it is viewed by artists and collectors in the United States and throughout the world. The work is selected by a panel of jurors and in each round six winning artists are chosen. Read more about the prize here.
QSS artist Gail Ritchie was one of the six winners for Summer 2024 (announced in February 2025).
The judges said “Gail eschews the sectarian tensions associated with her subject, the Troubles, by devising an ameliorative visual language: One that is suggestive of reverence and peace, without appealing in any identifiable way to a specific ideology. Instead of using colour to forge a connection and create meaning, Ritchie uses symbols with a shared and well-established meaning (a wreath, for example) which precedes the Troubles, and avoids reference to more detailed symbols recognizably associated with either side of the conflict”.
Gail Ritchie