Joint Award Winner
Chris Alton is a Devon-born, Manchester-based artist whose practice includes socially engaged projects, video essays, textile banners, and publications.
Each of his projects addresses an array of interconnected social, political, economic and environmental concerns, including: public space, mythology, soft power, tax avoidance, hierarchies, Britain's colonial history, and climate justice, amongst others.
Since 2021, he has been working on a collaborative project regarding grief, the absence of language for expressing it, and the creation of public spaces for it to be shared.
His short film Ways to Speak Absence is based on a poem by Matt Alton. It brings together spoken word, an original soundtrack, improvised movement, and a choral performance based on the chorus from Eminem’s Cleanin’ Out My Closet. The film’s primary themes are grief and bereavement; it speaks explicitly about the experience of losing a parent at a young age; addresses dysfunctional coping mechanisms; and picks at the language available for voicing loss.
@chrisalton
Joint Award Winner
Andy Cluer is a Devon based visual artist working in sound, sculpture and drawing. His practice explores relationships between different environments and human experiences, aiming to understand how we perceive and interact with the spaces we occupy, and how we have inflicted our presence on the land. He intends to reveal new dimensions and possibilities within these environments, which may have otherwise gone unnoticed.
Cluer’s graphite drawing series Moorland function both as a visual representation of sound and place, and as a collection of abstract sound scores. They map the ambient sonic landscapes of both Dartmoor and the Icelandic moors, exploring their shared resonances and blurred boundaries, mirroring the tension between silence and vibration, solidity and echo, presence and absence.
Beneath the Uplands is an audio work that echoes this acoustic atmosphere. Composed from layered field recordings, mixed and mastered into a continuous drone score, it creates a resonant ambient landscape that blurs memory, sensation, and place, suggesting the tonal depth and stillness of these upland environments.
@andycluer
Joint Award Winner
Yiduo Cheng is an interdisciplinary artist, based in London. Her practice
seeks to uncover hidden and institutionalised structures, perceptions, and narratives within the chaos of contemporary social order, while challenging the anthropocentric and hierarchical paradigms that dominate our understanding of the world.
She explores the tension between viewing animals as autonomous beings versus commodified resources, a duality that mirrors broader ethical dilemmas in capitalism, ecology, and post-humanist philosophy. She interrogates the paradox of our dual roles as caretakers and predators, a dynamic that echoes colonial structures in which dominance is masked as benevolence.
Her film Borrowed Silences was shot in Xinjiang, China, where remnants of traditional farming continue to shape the land. Rather than framing animals as passive subjects within a human-centred narrative, the film gently shifts its gaze, seeking to inhabit the periphery of human perception and attune to the quiet, embodied lives of animals. Ultimately, her work aims to envision a non-anthropocentric future—not as a distant ideal, but as an urgent, tangible possibility.
@yydd_cheng
Audience Choice Award Winner
Kenji Lim is a Singapore-born British artist based in Essex who works in sculpture, video, digital collage, installation, and painting. His work reflects and refracts the experience of the natural world through the prisms of culture, myth, philosophy, and the metaphysical. He attempts to shed the human way of seeing the world and think about what the world might look like through non-human eyes, those of another entity.
The creature in Cautiously Optimistic inhabits a vase, like a hermit crab occupies a seashell, while also inspired by the U-shaped burrows of lugworms, and the beautiful “tails” of leafhoppers, that can also become a “headdress”. Overthinking Is Bliss mimics the form of a decorative object with a tassel that echoes both East Asian ornamentation and a ball of multiplying cells on a string; eggs with the potential to sprout into something unknown. Cherbub is an angelic floating baby, hanging from a stream of its own glittering faeces. Its gaze challenges the viewer, meeting you as an equal of unfamiliar origin with huge unblinking eyes.
@kenji_lim_
Mani Kambo is a multidisciplinary artist, based in Newcastle upon Tyne, whose practice is rooted a family history within the caste system. Influenced by her upbringing in a household filled with superstition, prayer and religious ceremony, she employs a variety of personal totemic symbols. By layering and editing these images, she collages narratives and weaves dreamscapes, focusing on objects, routines and rituals distilled both from both the everyday and from mythology.
The repetition of imagery throughout her work links to notions of spirituality and a belief in reincarnation. They record movement, and document performative actions – the hand that creates, fire that reveals, water which is the purifier, and eyes that perceive. Each image functions as a meditation on eternal cycles: the serpent's wisdom coiling through time, hands raised in reverence to celestial forces, and the hypnotic spiral drawing us into life's rhythms. They invite viewers to find their own meaning bridging the gap between personal revelation and universal truth.
@manikambo
Ross Taylor is a London based artist who, through painting, performance and making books, reveals an inner world of personal stories and fictional characters, while probing the ambiguity of the creative process itself. His work is concerned with an emergent space. A place in which in-built fictions can intermingle, morph, and collide, connect to the beginnings of consciousness and maintain the hallucinations, patterns and images that unlock the biological happenings and evolutionary knowledge that the artistic journey encapsulates. “A swilling and churning dual sphere of production and consumption, where all that enters is incessantly gnawed, singed and regurgitated”.
These paintings belong to a body of work called The Ruinette that probes the condition of our surroundings and the effect they have on the architecture of our physical and social selves. Their subjects are placed within the strange spoil of botched national infrastructure projects and the ruinous gateposts of great houses, appearing to be exposed to an advancing state of irreverent progress.
@rislepeross
Charlotte Warne Thomas lives in London, UK. Her practice explores the relationships between labour, work and care to disrupt perceptions of value through a feminist lens.
She focuses on invisible labour, both of unpaid familial care by mothers* and of women artists, whose work continues to be overlooked and undervalued by a market-oriented art world. She probes the way these two inequalities intersect, the role of ‘love’ in both unpaid domestic care and (women) artists’ work, and the concepts of both reproductive and emotional labour.
Comforter features the phrase ‘wraparound care’, referring not only to the mother’s all-consuming care, but also to the breakfast- and after-school-clubs children attend while parents work, while the title Tax-free childcare alludes to the time it takes to navigate the arrangement of suitable childcare - whoever is paying for it. Based on the artist's own figure, these works emphasise the common tensions and impossible expectations inherent in her roles as both artist and mother.
[* ‘mother’ here refers to primary caregivers, regardless of reproductive role or gender identity.]
@charlottewarnethomas
Divya Sharma is a London-based British Indian artist who works in tapestry to weave strands of myth, stories and culture around her mother tongue Tamil. She uses salvaged or constructed materials, often combining tufting with glass beads that catch and refract the light to explore imagined, hidden, forgotten and ignored stories. Inspired by the self-taught technique of folk artists, she celebrates the imperfect perfection of error: of crookedness, the disproportional, and the critical rejection of artistic perfection and virtuosity.
The eyes of If you look to me, I will look to you reflect the vital role beads have played in India’s antiquity, used in trade, ritual, and decoration and to create a space to connect with her ancestors and inherited histories. In Unfinished Conversation the trance like process of tufting is used to commune with an ancestor matriarch, a Proto-Tamil woman with a deep connection to the earth and spirit and a solid and eternal presence, reminiscent of the timeless gaze of Easter Island heads.
@divyasharmastudio
Giles Round is based in East Sussex and works across architecture, art and design. His work often plays out through open-ended projects in which exhibitions themselves become the medium, creating conceptual frameworks to interrogate the role of the artist as an agent of transformation. Recent works conflate biographical details, imagery and writings of (predominantly queer) artistic antecedents, with Round’s own. The resulting objects, populated with citation and ‘misappropriation’, are semi-autobiographical, somewhat fictitious and all, in their own way, attempt to communicate with the dead.
Round’s ongoing series The Library includes a backdrop-like painting depicting a queer bookshop in Corsica designed by artist Don Bachardy who, it has been suggested, was stoned having eaten brownies made following the legendary Alice B Toklas recipe. It includes visual references to James Baldwin, David Hockney, John Minton, Martin Wong and Barbara Mennel. A further selection of works on paper depict book covers by notable queer artists and writers and act as a visual reading list, a celebration, and a homage to queer history.
@gilesround
Nancy Singh is an academic and artist originally from India who now lives and works in Bristol. Working in photography, installation and film, she explores themes of gender, identity, race and culture, aiming to capture reimagined moments that come from a place of nostalgia, memory and experience.
Her series I went back to see them was inspired by the experience of being a first-generation migrant and the feeling of ‘home’. It explores the migration experience from the perspectives of mothers and grandmothers whose family members have migrated for a variety of factors but stayed behind themselves. It centres on the psychological consequences of 'displacement' experienced by women, while also acknowledging that the concept of 'home' is an intricate combination of cultural, economic, and emotional factors. Blending both observation and imagination, her works respond to what life looks like for these women as they endure the separation from their families, while acknowledging the role of war as the biggest driver of forced migration.
@nancee.sin
Helen Acklam grew up in a coal mining valley in South Wales and is now based in Bristol. Through an embodied, site-specific practice, she makes sprawling connections between land and body, somatics and personal mythology. Collaborating with the already-meaningful materials of the landscape – earth, coal and stone – she explores her identity as a mother without children, and the impact of culture and place on individuals, communities and land. Her experimental sculptures in glass and stone explore the characteristics of the materials and their propensity to surprise and misbehave. Their moments of shattering, oozing, resisting, absorbing, speak to wider questions around the ways in which bodies, human and more-than-human, are shaped by the structures and systems that surround them.
Their title ///voices.betraying.applauded locates an area (through what3words) in the Garw Valley, part of the South Wales Coalfield, where both the rocks and the artist are from, acting as tether to a particular time, place and culture.
@ h.a.pics
Lily Wei is a Chinese-New Zealander who lives and works in London.
Drawing on her experiences growing up between New Zealand and China, she explores themes of Third Culture identity - those who don't fully identify either with their parents' culture, or the culture of the place they live. Her paintings aim to celebrate being part of the Asian diaspora, and to explore displacement, museum repatriation, movement and the (Welsh) concept of Hiraeth - or longing for home and identity. She employs images of culturally distinctive animals to express a more abstract idea of migration such as the stone lions peppered throughout London’s Chinatown, or the many Tang San Cai horses found in international museums such and private collections.
The painting Study of Tapirs is inspired by a sculpture found in the British Museum (number 1947,0712.333). Despite being thought to have only roamed China approximately 2500 years ago, ancient Chinese craftsmen continued to create tapir sculptures, perhaps through collective memory or overseas missionary influence.
@lilywei_art
Sophie Wake is a Devon-based painter and ceramicist who is influenced by shamanism, rock art, ancient clay models and pottery, and celebrates the power of raw basic human emotion in simple and authentic forms. Her practice is guided instinctive and automatic process of deep self-enquiry that are suffused with spiritual practices of meditation and ceremony.
The PEACE WARRIOR series depict strong and fiercely peaceful figures that are present, fearless and potent. They appear alongside images of birds that represent transformation and freedom, and horses that represent strength. Her Bird Earth Vessel works are made in earth pigments and oxides that retain a raw immediacy. Together, they question the very idea of containment, to explore and move beyond duality; the tension of inside and outside, enclosure and openness, interiority and exposure, suggesting a permeability of boundaries where neither state fully defines, and both coexist in fluid exchange. The birds represent transformation and freedom, standing as quiet witnesses on the earth yet evoking the expansive realm of sky and spirit.
@sophiewake_artist
Stacey Allan is a Surrey-based multi-disciplinary artist using sculpture, installation, video, and sound. Her work explores feminist world-building to address the everyday silencing of women through a whimsical, allegorical lens. She draws influences from folk art, surrealism and science fiction to develop her own mythology of deities and imagined realms, where the overlooked stories of women are celebrated, and all women’s voices are heard.
Her work, Avatar of the Beachcomber, is a physical representation of a beachcombing deity who collects lost stories embedded in seashells. Along with its accompanying song, it aims to give an audience pause for thought; perhaps tell a part of a story to which they can relate. Allan wants to talk about dark corners from a place of colour and light by applying magical thinking to the subject of contemporary women who find themselves without a voice: whether through societal pressures, patriarchal oppression, coercive control, anxiety and depression, or other forms of trauma.
@staceyallanart