Winning young talent - Sky Arts Futures Fund

The Sky Arts Futures Fund aims to create life-changing opportunities for your artists; one of the first winners was Daisy Evans, whose Silent Opera project debuted earlier this year (read our review). Amongst the winners this year are composer Mark Simpson and creative producer Kate Whitley. Each winner receives a bursary of £30,000 plus mentoring from senior staff at Sky and leaders in their industry, to help develop their creative practice and take their work to the next level. Simpson will be using the bursary to compose a new piece based on John Gray's book The Immortalisation Commission. The piece will be for solo violin, 45 instruments and voices, and will last 30 minutes. Whitley won with her classical music club night project TROSP, which takes concerts out of traditional halls and into disused car parks, nightclubs and industrial warehouses across the UK. She will be using the bursary to concentrate on the project, which returns to a car-park in Peckham this summer. Other winners are writer and poet Sabrina Mahfouz, choreographer Aakash Odedra and digital artist Lu Sisi. Further information from the Ideas Tap website.