Precedent setting

Datamine by Mark Stebbins, acrylic ink on board, 16 by 16 inches.

A Dal law school grad who is pursing his art practice is the winner of the inaugural Mayor’s Award of Distinction, Contemporary Visual Art.

Mark Stebbins, who graduated from Dalhousie with his law degree last year, will use earnings from the $10,000 first prize to pay off student loans and purchase art supplies. His painting, entitled Datamine, will be included in the HRM’s permanent art collection and displayed in a public location.

“One thing I learned while doing my law degree that the most valuable thing is time,” says Mr. Stebbins, who works part-time as the education and outreach coordinator at Dalhousie Art Gallery. “This award is helpful in so many ways—it’s validation, financial support and gives me time to do what I love doing.”

From Point Edward, Ont., Mr. Stebbins did his undergraduate degree in Fine Art from the University of Western Ontario. After a few years of art making and teaching, he decided to return to university to study law.

Mark Stebbins with his prize-winning painting at City Hall. (Danny Abriel Photo)

Ideally, he’d like to find a balance between his two interests, but hasn’t figured out how to do that yet, he says. “So I decided to take a year and focus exclusively on my art practice,” he adds.

His paintings are layered, dense and suggestive of many things, including hand-worked embroidery, crochet and quilting; cellular forms and micro-organisms; cartooning and pixellation. Small-scaled and incredibly detailed, his works— which take “an incredibly long time to put together”—evoke matter breaking apart and disintegrating.

Artists Jonathan Johnson and Daniel Hutchinson received honourable mentions in the competition, which was open to HRM-based, emerging and mid-career visual artists.

Short-listed works can be viewed on the HRM website.