EAR commissioned local artist Tim Westbury to create its award. Tim based the concept of the award on a Taoist tenet and offers this text in explanation:

P’u - simplicity, pre-linguistic purity

“This central tenet of Taoist philosophy is expressed mainly in Lao Tzu. Translations into English have included simplicity, ‘raw’ wood, and D.C. Lau’s more elaborate ‘uncarved block’. The essence of this concept is that all things in their original form contain an implicit natural power; power which may be easily spoiled or even destroyed when that simplicity is altered.

Lau’s detailed translation perhaps more sensitively expresses Lao Tzu’s point in using the metaphor in the context of names as ‘cutting’ things into types and the corollary theory that any such socially constructed distinctions (institutions) control by regulating desire. Once a society adopts names or defining terms, it does so in order to instill and regulate desire for one of the pair created by that name-induced distinction. So taoist ‘forgetting’ requires forgetting names and distinctions, but in doing so, frees itself from the socially induced, unnatural desires that cause strife and unhappiness in society (e.g. status, wealth, fame, authority): ‘The Nameless uncarved block thus amounts to freedom from desire’ (Tao te ching 37)”