Nadia Carney is Glyndebourne Tour Art Competition winner

Established in 2013, the annual competition offers a platform for new artists to showcase their work. As part of her prize, Nadia will see her winning image on the cover of several thousand copies of the Glyndebourne Tour Programme, which is distributed at Glyndebourne and theatres in Canterbury, Milton Keynes, Norwich and Liverpool.

Spokesman Luke Batchelor said: “The theme for this year’s competition was Disguise inspired by Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro where disguise takes many forms: a dress makes a pretty girl of a soldier; a veil transforms a maid into a grand lady; darkness turns a faithful wife into an illicit lover; a title makes a gentleman of a cad. But masks and costumes are only the start of the deception in a drama where private selves must be publicly concealed, where seeming and being are never quite the same thing. Artists were asked to interpret the theme of disguise in their own unique style using a range of different techniques and mediums. The winning piece, along with nine other shortlisted works, will be for sale and exhibited at Glyndebourne in an exhibition called In Disguise about the history of The Marriage of Figaro at the opera house. The exhibition will include historic material from the Glyndebourne collections and other contemporary works by Tom Hammick, Lois Oliver and Elena Ward and can also be viewed online at glyndebourne.com/tourart2022.”

Nerissa Taysom, curator of exhibitions and collections at Glyndebourne, said: “Art has the ability to unpack the themes of opera in fresh and unexpected ways. The Tour Art Competition aims to nurture international artistic talent and provide a platform for new artists to exhibit their work. This year's competition not only highlights the sheer creativity of new artists today, working in media as diverse as collage, digital painting and drawing, but the profound and universal appeal of opera to inspire. Our winner Nadia Carney and nine other shortlisted artists explore disguise as a tool to conceal or amplify, shape-shift and communicate about other times and places.”

Nadia, who lives in Uckfield in East Sussex, studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and graduated in 2007 with a degree in theatre design. She continued her studies at Chelsea College of Arts which led to various roles with the Spice Girls, Westlife, Royal Opera House and Glyndebourne, specialising in costume and set design. Her winning entry Mighty Masquerade features an abundance of graphic lines, silhouettes and patches of bold colour surrounding the crowned head of a woman. The work was created digitally using an iPad, a relatively new way of working for the artist that came about due to a lack of access to a studio which led her to experiment with new mediums.