PHOTOGRAPHER Tamzin Plummer is the overall winner of the 53 Degrees North student showcase at the New School House Gallery in York.

This competitive event for graduate art and applied art talent takes its title from York’s latitude, 53 degrees 57 minutes and 30 seconds north, and consequently it features the judging panel’s selection of 53 artists.

In its second year, the Arts Council-funded competition has been expanded from the north to nationwide, hence Tamzin, from University College, Falmouth, was able to enter and take home the £200 prize for her triptych combination of nude photography and drawing.

“The body of work I have produced has grown out of my love/hate struggle with photography as a creative process in culture today,” she says. “I explore the consequences of these seductive images and the saturated image culture of today have on intimate aspects of our lives.”

Manchester Metropolitan University student Joseph Hartley, winner of the applied arts section, has been offered a two-week residency at the gallery in mid-September on the strength of his work Worth Its Weight In Porcelain, a highly individualised set of measuring weights.

“This work is a response to the way we use weights and interact with it,” says Joseph. “I’m quite taken with the idea of people using their own non-official measuring devices.”

Explaining how his weights took shape, he reveals: “Once I wanted to bake a cake but had no weights, just a set of old scales, so I ended up assigning weight to various objects around the house with, for example, the dictionary acting as a kilogram.

“I knew they weren’t exact but that didn’t matter: the cake still came out delicious.”

The resulting porcelain work in the York exhibition has a series of numbers on the side that refer to the exact weight of each pot, which fit together like a Russian doll with the tops knocked off.

“This playful take on weights is a reflection of my own passion for cooking from the heart,” says Joseph.

Fellow Manchester Metropolitan University student Hannah Lovett, the winner of the inaugural 53 Degrees North prize last year, is exhibiting once more in the latest show, her two glass works having taken shape during her residency at the gallery in January this year.

Painting is less represented in the 2011 show, but Julie Macbean’s acrylic piece Redcar Wharf stands out anyway by dint of being such a memorable image of industrial decline.

“As a response to the recent downturn in industry, I created a series of works that reflect the neglect and demise of British industry, using the Redcar steelworks as visual testimony,” says the Teesside University student.

“I have tried to capture Redcar’s unstable and turbulent times in my paintings as scenes of abandonment, painted without people. This reflects a fractured community as people move away to find work elsewhere.”

Julie is one to watch, definitely, and that is one of the primary joys of an exhibition ripe with talent to spot early in its development.

• 53 Degrees North will run at the New School House Gallery, Peasholme Green, York, until August 27.