Welsh artist, 83, wins Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize

An 83-year-old artist from mid Wales has won one of the world’s most prestigious international art competitions.

Yvonne Crossley from Llandrindod Wells, Powys, was awarded the £15,000 Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, for her winning work Octogenarian Dancer.

The suspended wire figure, made from used wire and fishing wire, captures a dancer’s poise without arms or legs, and is a celebration of what her body can still do in her 80s, Crossley said.

“I’m on sticks, OK, I’ve got replacement hips, but I’m still, I’m still dancing,” she said.

Crossley beat over 2,500 other entries by more than 1,400 artists from across 48 countries.

Entrants could submit up to three works, drawn from an expanded definition of drawing that this year included Crossley’s wire and thread-based practice.

Crossley deliberately left out arms and legs in her work “not for any destructive reason”, she said, “but because it’s enough that it dances without the whole figure”.

“When I’ve made them where there’s a whole figure, they look more like dolls than they do dancers,” she said.

“I’m in my 80s,” Crossley said, “and one of the things that I’m interested in is some kind of celebration of arriving at this point in life”.

She acknowledged it was unusual for someone her age to win and said she hoped her win would challenge assumptions about who got to enter, and win, a major art prize.

“It’s never over till it’s over,” she said.

Selector Sook Kyung Lee, director of the Whitworth art gallery, said Crossley’s subject had been one that art had largely left alone.

“We reside in a culture invested in youth, which maintains a vexed relationship with old age,” she said.

“This work is about an ageing woman’s body, and how it changes through different stages.”