Oranj x ArtRabbit Poster Competition Winners

23 Mar 2021

By ArtRabbit

ArtRabbit and Oranj are pleased to announce the top entries for our Poster Competition on the theme of Rebirth. Of all the quality entries, the winning design belongs to photographer Will Creswick, with talented runners up Gwenba, Imo Crossland, Jess Pemberton, Kaitlin Swann and Darren Shaddick.

The judges consisted of the Oranj Wine team, the ArtRabbit team and artist Alec Doherty, who previously created a design for Oranj's October 2020 wine case poster.

We received over 170 entries in the short span of two weeks, all of which engaged creatively with the theme and showed artistic merit. We settled on the following top six artworks, with Will Creswick's witty and subversive photograph taking the top prize of all the submissions. Will's winning poster will be included in every April Wine Case from Oranj, along with natural wines curated by Patrick Campbell, the skilled sommelier of East London restaurant Brawn. Pre-order your wine case and be picnic-ready this April.

Winner: Will Creswick

Photo of a large bush growing into a gravestone, pushing it so the gravestone is lopsided.

Will first developed his photographic style documenting the lives of people skateboarding in Newcastle and slowly began to capture moments of zemblanity and irony in juxtapositions hidden amongst the ordinary. Shooting primarily on film, his recent works engage with human consumption and capture the feeling of dissatisfaction left in contrast to the beauty of the natural world. Using politics and societal injustice as inspiration, Will's work highlights the insignificance of human design and the ephemeral nature of life on earth.

Instagram: @wilcre
Website: www.wilcre.co.uk

Runners up

Gwenba

A digitally rendered dreamscape featuring a humanoid creature with glowing eyes amongst colourful greenery, drinking wine as a floating jug pours red liquid down.

GWENBA is a multidisciplinary, new media artist based in South Wales. Her work explores the relationship between organic and virtual spaces, forming digital growths from the earth's core, mirroring forms of Nature through the Aether to deliver complex and layered narratives rich in dark humour, laid over a phantasmagoria of homespun alien-like forms. 3D sculpture and data-manipulation form a central part of her myth-making, where a palimpsest of newly-original and ancient narratives become entangled.

Instagram: @g.wenba
Website: www.gwenba.com

Imo Crossland

A colourful scene with stylised individuals lounging against green at dusk, drinking wine and eating grapes.

Imogen, otherwise known as Imo, is an illustrator from Manchester who creates colourful worlds through digital collage. Togetherness is a running theme through her practice. She thinks of her work to be a nod to joy, leisure, colour and closeness. Imo's work is a reminder of all the good times and the fun times, which is why her work has been more important than ever to her over the last year.

Instagram: @imocrossland
Website: www.imocrossland.com

Jess Pemberton

A glitched digital collage of a reclined person against a green background.

Having graduated from MA Digital Media Arts at Brighton University in 2020, Jess Pemberton is a collage artist working with both analogue and digital processes. She creates a range of web + coded art, moving image, album cover art, scanner art and digital collage. She has exhibited her works in the UK and internationally, frequently collaborates with musicians and is a guest lecturer for Falmouth University's Fine Art course. Jess will be undertaking a residency with Digital Artist Residency in December this year, where she will be further exploring digital ontology.

Instagram: @jess_pemberton
Website: www.jesspemberton.com

Kaitlin Swann

An anthropomorphised wine bottle and wine glass making kissy faces at each other on orange bedding

Kaitlin Swann is a second-year graphic design and illustration student at Liverpool John Moores University. With illustration being her preferred discipline, she has been exploring different methods of creation, from producing short animations and digital prints to 3D sculptures and models. With this year being especially tough on art students, Kaitlin has taken it upon herself to be more proactive and do extra work outside of the university to find her style. Her response to the theme Rebirth is a fun, multimedia piece. She has been experimenting with digital collaging by incorporating gelli-plate printing experiments as texture and magazine samples to add character.

Instagram: @batsy.artsy

Darren Shaddick

Illustration of stumpy characters with giant hands drinking wine surrounded by nature.

Darren is an Illustrator based out in the sticks of North Devon. His work is playful and colourful and often features a variety of characters and fauna. Lockdown has given him the time to get to know various wines, especially natural wines, and appreciate them like never before. Darren's previous clients include Bandcamp, giffgaff and Ralph Lauren, for whom he created 25-30 custom portraits of editors and influencers using only a mouse and MS paint during one very long evening. He has exhibited his artwork internationally, in London, Tokyo, Barcelona and beyond.

Website: www.darrenshaddick.co.uk
Instagram: @darren.shaddick
Twitter: @darrenshaddick

About Oranj

Oranj is a curated intersection where 'art meets art'. Oranj celebrates low-intervention winemakers next to artists and DJs and is 100% independent, funded purely by natural wine sales and its membership programme ClubOranj.

Their main mission is to always be contributing, whether environmentally, by inspiring change through supplying delicious sustainably produced, chemical-free natural wines, showcasing up and coming artists through posters and shows, or promoting the latest tunes or mix from DJs and musicians. Oranj is as much a wine shop as it is a gallery, club, bar, magazine, and the embodiment of the age-old philosophy of appreciating craft in all of its magical forms, a place for those who want to appreciate the good life through good grapes.

Put simply, as an organisation that marries art, music and wine together, and the first independent drinks company to actually care about art and music, it's only right to want to find a way to contribute back to the culture.

Founder Jasper Delamothe says, "Most of my former recreational adult life in normal times was spent dragging friends to see weird conceptual art in galleries, listening to loud techno in sweaty raves, and drinking wine I didn't have the vocabulary to describe.

"Winemaking happens to be one of the oldest art forms, so when embarking on a journey of discovery to learn more about it, and opening up a shop to do this, it was impossible to separate it from other art forms I feel very passionate about. This has manifested into finding a way to facilitate the production of work from artists, DJs and musicians through wine sales. I want Oranj to be 2021's answer to the Bauhaus, here to blur the lines between art and craft, but with the sound of an 808 playing somewhere in the background, and maybe a full glass of Pantellerian orange wine in hand. The pandemic reminded me how short life really is, and that we're all better off doing something we give a shit about. Support the artist!"

Previous artists Oranj has worked with include Faye Wei Wei, Adelina Sasnauskaite, Laura Callaghan, Coco Bayley and more.

→Pre-order the April Wine Case now

Pre-order Oranj's April Wine Case, featuring natural wines curated by Brawn sommelier Patrick Campbell and the winning design by Will Creswick, printed on an A3 270gsm paper poster.