John Gerrard: The Legacy Fellowship
The Legacy Fellowship, the first-ever artist fellowship to fuse art and sport, has been awarded to John Gerrard.
Over the coming months John will be based at the University of Oxford’s Iffley Road sports complex, an officially recognised Pre-Games Training Camp, where he will work alongside student athletes and 2012 hopefuls. He was awarded the fellowship for his proposal to create a realistic simulated world populated by virtual athletes whose movements derive from the actions of real athletes in the year building up to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Iffley Road sports complex hosts the Oxford Boat Race crew for their indoor training and is the home ground of Oxford University Rugby Football Club. It was here in 1954 that Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile, an event that ensured Iffley Road’s iconic status in the annals of sporting achievement.
John Gerrard was born in Dublin in 1974 and first experimented with 3D scanning while studying at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. He has a postgraduate degree in Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a further degree in computer science from Trinity College, Dublin.
He exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2009 and has recently shown at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. Earlier this year he collaborated with celebrated choreographer Wayne McGregor on a new piece for the Royal Ballet called Live Fire Exercise, which premiered at the Royal Opera House in London, and his major new work Infinite Freedom Exercise (near Abadan, Iran) was recently installed in Manchester as part of the Manchester International Festival.
The Legacy Fellowship forms a part of Relay, a programme of new visual arts commissions and live events taking place across the south east of England in response to London 2012.
Organised by the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art in collaboration with Oxford University Sport and Modern Art Oxford and supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, Culture Ireland, John Fell OUP Research Fund, Podium and Magdalen College, Oxford.
