Winners selected in online Gibraltar Body Art Festival

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic the Gibraltar Body Art Association held this year’s festival online with entrants from across the globe.

The Gibraltar Body Art Association held its eighth annual Body Art festival during March 2020 mere days before going into lockdown.

As plans were being organised for the eventual 2021 event, the Body Art Association made the very difficult decision as many other events had, to move it online and present the Gibraltar Body Art festival Online Edition 2021 with this year’s theme being ‘World Disney 50th Anniversary’.

As per tradition, various categories were presented including body paint and face paint.

With having an online event new challenges were brought up for the committee and organisers, so for the first time in the festival’s history ‘selfie’ and ‘FX’ categories were introduced.

The new categories allowed organisers to maximise the participants who would still want to take part in some way or form, but who may or may not have still been affected by lockdown restrictions in their locations.

Another major change of going online as opposed to physical which most were worried about was the timing of the individual category days.

Rather than being restricted to regional regulations the festival was held throughout the month of May, allowing participants from around the world including Gibraltar, UK, Italy, Japan, USA, Mexico and Australia to prepare and submit their various entries without the worry of a fixed date as a 2-3 day festival is typically held.

This year’s judging panel was diverse, consisting of a team of previous international guests and what would have been the planned panel of guests for this year from the UK, USA and Spain, who have worked in their respective makeup- arts, movie and film industries and gave their time to review each of the entries individually and through zoom.

The organisers set as many of the rules in place as in most previous festivals and their competitions with all participants under pressure within a time scale of between three to 10 hours to produce a final piece, which was then submitted to their respective judging team.

Each entry was scrutinized and analysed under various aspects, brushwork, line work, theme, story behind idea and overall look.
The winners were announced a few days after the festival closed and the points were collected and tallied.

Winners included, Body Paint category 1st Place Serena Dalla Torre, 2nd Place Shauna Burns, 3rd Place Ulianka Maksymiuk.
Face Paint category 1st Place Ulianka Maksymiuk, 2nd Place Meghan Davis, 3rd Place Linda Baker.

Selfie Paint Category 1st Place Ana Maria Castelan, 2nd Place Ulianka Maksymiuk, 3rd Place Ilaria Fumarola.

FX category 1st Place Linda Baker, 2nd Place Cheryl Howes,3rd Place Louise Perera.

The association thanked the Gibraltar Ministry of Culture for all their help towards the festival, without forgetting all the amazing models, artists, judges and photographers who put in so much of their time and effort who without, this amazing event would not have happened along with our sponsors.

The full gallery of participants and categories and be found on their website:
www.gibraltarbodyart.wixsite.com/festival/2021 alternatively in their Facebook group or email gibraltarbodyart@hotmail.com for more information.