2nd edition, 2007–2009, Hannah Rickards

There is a relationship between the things being there and not being there, simultaneously. […] somehow there is this contingency to the image, it is there and not there at the same time.
Hannah Rickards

For the second edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, winning artist Hannah Rickards (b. 1979) focused on the subjective divergences, consistencies, and echoes and counterpoints in spoken accounts of an image of a city seen over Lake Michigan as the result of rare temperature inversion mirages.

No, there was no red., Rickard’s winning project for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, reflects the artist’s ongoing interest in the perception and translation of natural phenomena. In Rickards’s work, they become the point of departure for an in-depth analysis of how images and sounds are perceived through language.

During her Italian residency, Rickards travelled between Rome and Biella. The support provided by the American Academy in Rome and Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella provided Rickards with the time and resources to reseach and develop her work.

No, there was no red.

Whitechapel Gallery (5–23 September 2009)

Collezione Maramotti (25 October 2009–30 November 2010)

Rickards’s Italian residency led to the creation of the split-screen video No, there was no red. This artist often explores how natural phenomena are perceived and described: in Thunder (2005), for instance, an eight-second recording of a thunderclap was stretched out to seven minutes and transformed into an instrumental score by composer David Murphy. Another installation, exhibited in London at The Showroom in 2007, is built around interviews with people who describe hearing the sounds made by the northern lights.

Superior mirages were one of the first natural phenomena that the artist encountered in the Arctic, and became her starting point for No, there was no red. Through the words of eyewitnesses, this work describes the image of a displaced city floating over the surface of Lake Michigan. It is the result of a peculiar natural phenomenon, the superior mirage: at a certain relative density, layers of air can refract images that are normally below the visible horizon. In No, there was no red., Rickards examines the relationship among the recurring verbal, paraverbal, and non-verbal elements (words, gestures, descriptive and visual forms) that turn up in the interviews, to investigate how such images can be described.

In 2014, Rickards had a major exhibition at Modern Art Oxford. In 2015, she received the Leverhulme Prize, which recognizes extraordinary research by artists whose work has had an international impact and whose future career is extremely promising.