LONDON.- Hannah Rickards, winner of the 2007 - 2009 MaxMara Art Prize for Women, has completed her six-month residency in Italy, which was awarded as part of the Prize. The resultant work, No, there was no red. will be showcased at the recently expanded Whitechapel Gallery from 5 - 23 September 2009. The award, which promotes and nurtures UK based talent, is chaired by Iwona Blazwick, Director of the Whitechapel Gallery. MaxMara has chosen to work with the Whitechapel Gallery because of its wide reputation for championing women artists.

Rickards’ two-screen film is based on spoken accounts of a displaced image of a city seen over Lake Michigan as the result of rare temperature inversion mirages. The subjective divergences, consistencies, echoes and counterpoints of these accounts, will form the core of the piece. It will be acquired permanently by the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, where it will be presented in Italy from 24 October 2009.

Upon winning the MaxMara Art Prize for Women Rickards was awarded a six-month residency in Italy, which was spent at the American Academy in Rome and the Pistoletto Foundation in Biella. This, together with funding received through the Prize and supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, has afforded Rickards the time to research and develop the work.

Rickards often works with how natural phenomena are experienced and translated. In Thunder (2005) she stretched an eight second recording of a thunderclap to 7 minutes, this sound was then transcribed in to a score by composer David Murphy. The score was recorded and reduced back to the length of the original thunderclap. Another installation, exhibited at The Showroom in 2007, was structured around the spoken accounts of people who had reported perceiving the sound of the Aurora Borealis.

Luigi Maramotti, Chairman of MaxMara comments, “I’m delighted that Hannah has achieved the specific aims of the objective with this extraordinary film. It is entirely the said intention of the Prize that artists can use the time and space created. We are very much looking forward to seeing the work installed in one of the world’s greatest contemporary spaces, the Whitechapel Gallery, and after that in Italy. Hannah Rickards is a rare talent and I firmly believe that the MaxMara Art Prize for Women has afforded her the platform and the time that will ensure the viability of her work.”