Jack Shepherdson (BA History of Art) has been awarded the 2012 Association of Art Historians' Student Dissertation Prize for his undergraduate dissertation Dichotomies: The Visual and the Spatial in Early British Land Art.

The prize is awarded by the AAH, in collaboration with publishers Thames & Hudson, for the most outstanding undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations submitted by UK based students of History of Art and Visual Culture.

Entries for the prize were assessed on the following qualities:

Originality: the dissertation should demonstrate a mature and original approach to issues and themes of current concern to the discipline in its broadest interpretation.

Research: This should be thorough, broad and combine primary and secondary sources as appropriate.

Method: This should show a clear awareness of appropriate methodological approaches.

Content: The dissertation should be clearly structured, all source material should be soundly evaluated, the argument or line of enquiry should be balanced and the conclusion well grounded.

Dichotomies - The Visual and the Spatial in Early British Land Art

ABSTRACT:

This dissertation sets out to investigate the dichotomy between the 'original' three dimensional work and the two dimensional, secondary, recorded work in the early work of the artists Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy. Key early works were separated from previous Romantic interpretations and instead interpreted from a spatial perspective based on the spatial theory of David Summers. An apparent, but not recognised, tension between different categories of space in earlier analyses of the works prompted the consideration of spatial theory. This led to the discovery that the dichotomy between 'original' and secondary work is an integral feature of the works which raises their level of philosophical investigation. It is concluded that the philosophical investigations which the artists undertake in these works are to do with the limitations of 'abstract' human constructs of space and time.

Read more about Jack and his experience of studying art history at UEA in our current course brochure.