Arts boss: bring Turner Prize to Scotland

The head of Scotland’s arts agency has called for the Turner Prize exhibition to come north after a Scottish artist won Britain’s biggest arts prize for the third year in a row.

Andrew Dixon, chief executive of Creative Scotland, said the prize had attracted a huge amount of interest since moving from London to Gateshead this year and would be well received in Scotland. “We must get the Turner Prize to Scotland because we have such a legacy of Scottish artists that have been nominated and won,” he said.

Mr Dixon was in his former stamping ground in the north-east of England this week to see Glasgow artist Martin Boyce, 43, win the £25,000 award for his sculptures and installations.

As a former head of Northern Arts, Mr Dixon helped to raise funding and drive forward the conversion of a flour mill to the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts in Gateshead, where the prize show was hosted this year.

Each year, after the shortlist for the Turner Prize is announced, the nominated artists produce a joint exhibition. This year more than 120,000 people visited the exhibition in the Baltic, after it was staged outside London for only the second time in its 25-year history.

“I had to queue 30 minutes to get in, it’s so popular. This has captured the imagination of the people in the north-east and it would do the same in Scotland,” Mr Dixon said. “I think the move of the Turner Prize out of London has refreshed it.”

With pictures of the work of Karla Black, this year’s other Scottish nominee, on the Newcastle Metro, the show brought new exposure for artists, he said.

Boyce was the sixth Scottish artist to win the Turner Prize since Douglas Gordon in 1996, from a string of winners and nominees who were almost all raised or trained in Glasgow, mostly through the Glasgow School of Art.

The artist, who has shown his sculptural installations across the UK and Europe, paid tribute to the support he got from fellow artists in Glasgow. But while Creative Scotland and its predecessor the Scottish Arts Council paid for Boyce to represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2009 – along with fellow nominee Black in 2011 – he downplayed the suggestion that his win sealed a Scottish sweep of the awards. “They are just artists, they are not Scottish artists,” said Boyce. “We all exhibit all over the world.”

The Turner Prize has been an annual fixture of the art world and frequent source of controversy over contemporary art since it was launched in the mid-1980s. Run by the Tate Gallery, it went to the Tate Liverpool in 2007, but the Baltic was its first move outside the Tate system.

In future, it is expected to alternate between London, where it returns in 2012, and other British cities. Godfrey Worsdale, director of the Baltic centre, said: “It’s wonderful to have a Turner Prize here in Gateshead.”

Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota, said: “The Turner Prize is a national institution so it’s absolutely right that it should be seen nationally and not just in London.”

Professor Seona Reid, director of the Glasgow School of Art, where Boyce trained, said: “We are delighted that Martin’s work has been recognised by this accolade. This is another feather in the cap for the visual arts community in Glasgow. Perhaps the time is right for the Turner Prize to come to Scotland.”