Awards and Press

Awards

2010 Finalist for UJADF (UK Japan ADF award), London, England

2009 Vermont Studio Center, Artist in Residence with Partial Fellowship Award, Johnson, USA

2008 Dewar Arts Award

2007 Hope Scott Trust Award

2007 Short listed for the RSA Alastair Salvesen Travel Scholarship, Edinburgh, Scotland

2003 Short listed for the Sefton Open Art prize, The Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport, England

2002 The James Torrance Memorial Award, awarded from the RGI, The Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts

2001 The Cross Trust fund, a travel and material bursary. Spent a month sketching in Beijing, China, and Tokyo, Japan

1999 The Virtuosi Society, a travel bursary to visit museums and galleries in the UK

“Exploring the luminous, emotive potentiality of colour, tone, texture, Elaine Woo’s paintings, hung in the dilapidated Emerged space on Bell Street, are intense, focused mediations on portraiture. Lonely, contemplative figures, sipping a drink or gazing out of the painting, look dissolute, solitary, against backdrops of vibrantly connotative colour, sometimes echoing the grim, existential black of a Francis Bacon portrait. One of the figures, lit by an ethereal light that gives one side of his face a ghostly pallor, sits lonely with a glass, like an Edward Hopper painting, whilst in another the same figure, seemingly squeezed into the canvas, is backed by a wooden yellow which makes it seem as if he’s inside a coffin. Unafraid of grim or potentially disturbing work, Woo’s paintings are psychologically penetrating and almost voyeuristic in their glimpses of interior worlds or evocative in mood. Dark, sexual, beautiful and sad, her figures and the spaces they inhabit are fascinatingly pensive.”

Jasper Hamil, Skinny Magazine, a review on ‘Portraits’ at Emerged space, 2006

Skinny Magazine, ‘20 years of the Gallowgate Studio’ preview with image of ‘Late Afternoon’, 05.06
Scotsman, “Young female Scottish exhibition’ in Westminster, London, 23.11.04
Scotsman and The Herald Newspaper, awards at Standard Life investments, 27.05.04
Galleries Magazine, January 2004 edition, UK, 01.2004