Ambivalently optimistic about art … Elizabeth Price on her £60,000 Contemporary Art Society Annual Award. Photograph: David Levene  One year after winning the "Turner surprise" – as my five-year-old nephew Malachy aptly named it – I found myself on another shortlist, for the Contemporary Art Society's Annual Award. I've had such a great run of luck lately, that I've become superstitious: I'm waiting for something bad to happen. The life of an artist – of most artists – is generally precarious. The glamorous stories of a celebrated few in the mainstream media are not indicative: every artist I know has his or her chin just a fraction above the waterline.  What is distinctive about the Annual Award is that the prize isn't for work you have done, but for new art. It is given to a national museum in order to commission a new piece of contemporary art for their collection. There is an emphasis upon regional museums. Indeed, in every instance so far the prize has been awarded outside of London to Wakefield, Sheffield, Nottingham, Lincoln and now Oxford. My ambition for my own work is for it to be held in public collections, to be available to the widest possible audience – but also to engage the experiences and collective memories of that audience.  Like many artists, I am preoccupied with the histories and debates that shape 20th-century and contemporary art. But I do try not to make art that only addresses a small professional world; instead, I embed such concerns in other social histories, and different kinds of knowledge. I have made art that has explored the vigorous, hallucinatory art and architecture of English Gothic churches; the fatal and traumatic events of a department store fire in Manchester; and the polymorphous sexiness of British cosmetics advertising in the 60s. I have often reflected on the history of phonography, a technology initially promoted as a means to retain the voices of the dead, but ending up as the vital medium of pop music.  Reading on mobile? Click here to view Tate video  Usually, I have an autobiographical attachment to the subjects I explore. I use pop music – with its cathartic, libidinal pleasures – to draw on my formative experiences as a shy teenager growing up in Luton, listening to post-punk on the radio. Its alienated fury and arch, satiric wit offered me an ambivalent optimism. Adult life was going to be hard, hazardous and probably sorrowful, I deduced. But still, there were all these bold, witty people out there in the world, finding inventive ways to express themselves. Maybe I could find them and join in. Maybe I could even get off with some of them.  I have always held a pretty broad definition of art: when I say "art" I mean music, literature and cinema, as well as visual art. Whatever its form or medium I think art is, or should be, a way to understand our time – the time in which we live. It is a way to apprehend and influence it. Everything that tries to do this counts as art for me. By the same token, I'm curious about things that would never declare themselves as art, but still tell us about life: utilitarian objects, product design, clothing, technological apparatus. They all address us with a powerful insistence about how we could or should live, act, be.  It is because of my wide-ranging interests that I am so happy to work with the extraordinary archaeological and ethnographic collections of the Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers. I'm obviously not an expert in antiquities – and my own medium is digital video. So I'm interested in what these objects mean to us now, or what they may mean, through the technologies I use, and within the context of a new artwork.  I'm not sure where I'll end up, but I'm starting by looking at a collection of small terracotta sculptures of the female figure. Within the Ashmolean there are many such figures. Indeed, the making of these sculptural images of women was a widespread, long-standing practice throughout eastern Europe and the Middle East during the bronze age (about 3000-1000BC). It is not possible to say what they were for, who they were for, or who made them, but they were clearly an important part of life.  Notwithstanding this occluded history, these objects seem powerfully direct. The figure is communicated in a terse combination of stylised facial and sexual characteristics, via two distinct sculptural gestures. There is the embellishment of the terracotta to create eyes, breasts, noses. Then there are depressions or incisions into the terracotta to articulate body hair, genitals and fingers. The sculptures look swiftly made and convey artistic fluency, but also impart to the figure a vigorous, sexual confidence. It is striking how candidly the female genitalia is depicted, and viewed from our own visual culture saturated with probing images of the female body, these seem differently, more generously frank. Perhaps these witty, ebullient images – which we can never precisely understand – can be used to disclose something of our own culture?  I remain ambivalently optimistic about art, and how it can engage with life. I don't think the value to society of art is that we might also buy a cappuccino when we visit a gallery. Arguments about art's regenerative potential and economic significance, which have become so necessary in these mean, misanthropic times, promote an impoverished idea of its pleasures and possibilities. In the light of this, the social ambition and creative generosity of the Annual Award seems even more remarkable. I'll do my best to live up to it.
After winning another prestigious award, the artist explains her debt to pop music, why getting the Turner prize last year made her superstitious – and why ancient sculptures are inspiring her next project