A LEIGH artist has been shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize exhibition.

Tris Vonna-Michell is one of four artists shortlisted for the annual contemporary art prize.

Vonna-Michell’s film Finding Chopin: Dans l’Essex (2014), features salt marshes and the Essex coastline and is inspired by a French sound poet who spent part of his life in Essex, close to where the 31-year-old artist grew up.

His other work, Postcript II (Berlin) 2014, is a slide installation based on a story about the artist’s mother’s childhood in post-war Germany.

Collette Bailey, managing director of Chalkwell-based arts collective Metal, met Tris when he was in residence with the group in 2009 working on what would become the exhibition at the Focal Point Gallery.

She said: “It’s fantastic news for Southend. Tris was in residence while he worked on a piece for the gallery. He took his mix of installation and live performance to various venues in Southend and it was very well received.

“It was fantastic for him to do that with his history of Southend at a time when he had a very up and coming trajectory in the arts. It shows the skill the Focal Point Gallery has in spotting up and coming artists.”

The Turner Prize, now in its 30th year, has a reputation for controversy. Visitors to this year’s exhibition will be met with more than 90 minutes of film to watch – including one of an adult nature.

Von-Michell is up against Duncan Campbell, Ciara Phillips and James Richards.

Mr Richards, 31, from Cardiff is showing Rosebud 2013, his film which includes partially censored, erotic images from a book found in a Tokyo library. Dublinborn Mr Campbell’s films – one of which lasts almost an hour – tackle African art and colonialism and equations from Karl Marx’s Capital Volume 1.

Curator Lizzie Carey-Thomas said that all the shortlisted artists tackled a “lack of fixed meaning” in the world around them in their work.

She said: “The predominant use of film in the show responded to ‘how we navigate the world increasingly through images’.

“The internet changed the way that we interact with each other.

It’s only natural that the artists respond to that.”

Glasgow-based artist Ciara Phillips, 38, is the only artist not to use film in the exhibition – her installation, Things Shared (2014), features prints.