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Bill Woodrow
Shortlisted: 1986

Bill Woodrow has made sculptures from discarded objects and materials, obsolete electrical appliances and domestic equipment found in streets and junkyards. His recycling was motivated partly by his dislike of the excesses of consumer society, but also by the more practical consideration that they were readily available. His ironic and witty sculptures have been described as stressing 'the mortality of the object and the transitoriness of human life'.

Bill Woodrow was born near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire in 1948. He studied at St Martin's School of Art from 1968 to 1971 and completed his postgraduate degree at Chelsea School of Art in 1972. He was nominated in 1986 for his general contribution to British art and more specifically for his sculpture Natural Produce, an Armed Response exhibited at La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art in California.

This information has been taken from The Turner Prize: Twenty Years, by Virginia Button, Tate Publishing, 2003.

View Bill Woodrow in the Tate Collection