The story of Doggerland – a sunken Mesolithic landmass off Britain’s East coast – is a cautionary tale to the consequences of rapidly rising sea levels. Those studying the area are discovering that the changing climates faced by these ancient people are frighteningly analogous to our own. Doggerland, like a real life Atlantis, is now a sunken and mostly forgotten Stone Age culture only evidenced by drowned artefacts of its people.
The Coastline of North-East England is known for being one of the fastest eroding coastlines in Europe, with some areas losing land at an average of 2 meters per year. Just as Doggerland’s displaced inhabitants offered their gods magical sculptural offerings to stave off persistent rising tides, I want to use the award to likewise create an exhibition of new speculative monuments and handheld votives for a contemporary civilisation currently succumbing to ecological catastrophe – sculpture as alms and shrines for the Neo-Global-Doggerlanders – to draw attention, critique, inspire or even to mollify presentday pelagic gods against our encroaching coastlines.
The award will enable the means to explore new ways of presenting sculpture that focus on more active interactions with audiences – through touch and physical experience. I’m fascinated in the magical power of mesolithic sculpture and its ability to function as both an artistic object and performative magical material. I want to use the award to explore how this ritual materialism can be brought to my sculptural making and use its exhibiting opportunities to experiment with how this participatory sculpture is presented to audiences.
I see these as works to be navigated by individuals, where heads are placed in holes and bodies squeezed into tight spaces. Works that invite poking fingers, prostrate forms, embracing arms, pressed eyes or exploratory tongues. Works enshrined with films to reveal secrets, stimulate dreams or cause hallucinations. Sculptures that burst in to noises that operate somewhere between ceremony, ritualistic sacrifice and music video; creating songs, chants and performances that function as expiatory offerings in the face of environmental catastrophe.
The exhibitions and sculptural installations I’ve produced over recent years have been critically praised for their ability to tackle important and urgent social issues through work that is both accessible, sculpturally exciting and narratively engaging. The central themes within the show are hugely reflective of the cultural heritage and environmental concerns of County Durham; both as a critical location of research into rising global sea levels as well as one of the richest sources of neolithic carving and objects across all of Europe.
My expectation is that the work produced across this project will engage directly with local research, expertise and social histories to create a body of work that showcases the deep-historical cultural heritage and the important contemporary environmental issues of Darlington and the wider county area.
As well as this, with this project’s intent to find new ways to engage directly with audiences to make work that sets out to create bodily and emotional interactions with audiences, I believe that the successful outcomes of this work will produce work that excites and captures the imagination of the public and generates both a local and wider interest in the work created as a result of this award.
I’m a visual artist whose practice encompasses sculptural installations, performance, drawing & moving image, frequently structured around the narratives and visual rhetoric behind images of authority. The work is recognisable for its visceral and energetic handling of materials normally associated with classical and modernist sculpture. Expressed through the symbolic bombast of the colonial statuary of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and iconic Pop figures of heroic masculinity, my practice aims to provide a critical understanding of the effects of our cultural heritage in a contemporary context. I have had solo presentations of my work with VITRINE Gallery (London) in 2022, Deborah Bowman (Brussels) in 2020, Phoenix Gallery (Exeter) and VITRINE Basel in 2018 as well as several solo and two person shows upcoming in 2025/6. I have been included in group shows at City Art Centre Edinburgh, Camden Arts Centre, SPACE, ICA London, the Bluecoat Liverpool, The Royal Scottish Academy, Saatchi Gallery and the Museum of Sheffield as well as internationally in New York, Los Angeles, Basel, Brussels, Lisbon, Kyiv, Turin and Prague.
MA Sculpture, Royal College of Art, 2013-15
BA Hons Art, Philosophy & Contemporary Practice, 2006-09
I have received the XL Catlin People’s Choice Award (2016), Saatchi UK/Raine Sculpture Award and the LANDsecurities Show Award in 2016. I have received funding support from Creative Scotland in 2021 and 2024.
I was recently invited to participate in Scottish charity and studio space provider Outer Spaces’ Bank Commissions 2025 – a bold programme of newly commissioned works open to the public – in response to the historic former Clydesdale banking hall on St Vincent St in Glasgow. I was commissioned to create works of wall-based sculpture as well as a massive figure placed atop the former bank’s desk. Part throne, part horse, and constructed from a chaotic pile of materials, it looms over visitors as they enter, echoing the commanding presence of the building itself.
The new installation engages directly with the grandiose, authoritarian architecture of the former Clydesdale banking hall. Designed to project power, wealth, and institutional permanence, the space, with its towering ceilings, muted tones, and classical features, was built to impress, intimidate, and assert control.
The work explores how such environments shape our psychological and emotional responses. The title Crème Frêche Amygdala Hummm references the amygdala, the brain’s emotional processing centre, and the instinctive reactions we experience in response to authority and spectacle. Through grotesque figuration, exaggerated scale, and theatrical compositions, the works challenge the architectural legacy of control embedded in the building’s design.
I have been featured in the most recent issue of Art Review alongside Jeremy Deller in Louise Benson’s article ‘Fevered Imaginings: The Mythical Untruths of Britain’s Glorious Past’. Also this month my recent show ‘Psycho Home Counties’ received several written reviews including Time Out.
https://artreview.com/fevered-imaginings-the-mythical-untruths-of-britains-glorious-past/
https://www.timeout.com/london/art/jamie-fitzpatrick-psycho-home-counties
As well as these, my work has been featured and reviewed in Frieze, CURA, Metal Magazine, Time Out, This is Tomorrow, Artuner Online, Temple, Conceptual Fine Arts, Tagesspiegel, After Nyne, FAD Magazine, Vice, The Scotsman, The Skinny, BRUZZ,White Hot Magazine, Traction, The Telegraph, The Catlin Award.
I have taken part in several residencies, including Hospitalfield Arbroath (2024), Edinburgh Printmakers Artist in Residence (2022), Eastside International Los Angeles (2017) Biruchiy Art Project (supported by the British Council in Ukraine 2016).
In 2024, I took part in Hospitalfield Arbroath’s Interdisciplinary Residency to develop a new body of research that drew parallels with Scotland’s history of Witch Hunts and the increasing radicalisation of young men online forums promoting masculinity, misogyny, and opposition to feminism collectively known as the Manosphere. The research worked towards a new multi-channel moving image work that explored the drive to acts of misogynistic aggression loosely based around the Angus Witch Trials.
In 2016, I was invited by the British Council in Ukraine to take part in the Biruchiy Art Project. The residency program took place on the Biruchiy peninsula that connects mainland Ukraine to the Crimea. The residency took place in a former holiday resort two miles behind the fighting at the newly contested border. During the residency, I developed a series of puppets and newly worked script for a performance of Punch and Judy that drew directly from the geopolitical events of the area post-Maidan.
Email: jamiefitzpatrickstudio@gmail.com
Address: 72 Inveresk Road, Musselburgh, EH21 7BQ, GB
Local Authority: East Lothian
