Artist Award Scheme 2025
In summer 2025, fifty sculptors from across the UK each received a £2,000 grant to support their practice through the third round of the Foundation’s Artist Award Scheme.
This unrestricted funding aims to alleviate the growing financial pressures faced by artists amid the UK’s mounting cost of living crisis and arts funding cuts.
About the Artist Award Scheme
Originally launched in 2020 as a response to the devastating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Artist Award Scheme offers meaningful financial support to artists during times of crisis. That year, the Foundation awarded £60,000 to 40 artists. In 2022, the fund was expanded to £100,000 in response to the escalating cost-of-living crisis – an amount that has been maintained in 2025.
The 2025 recipients reflect the rich diversity of contemporary sculpture in the UK, spanning a range of career stages, backgrounds, and artistic approaches. The fund is unrestricted, allowing artists the flexibility to use the money however they need to, whether that’s paying studio rent, buying materials, or bridging funding gaps for projects that might not otherwise proceed.
The 2025 artists were selected through a UK-wide nomination process involving 25 leading voices from the non-profit arts sector, representing all regions of the UK. Nominators included Viviana Checchia, Director of Void in Derry; Nicole Yip, Director of Spike Island in Bristol; Andrew Parkinson, Curator at Pier Arts Centre, Orkney; and Karen McKinnon, Curator at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea.
Artist Award Scheme 2025 recipients
Abbas Zahedi Abi Palmer Adébayo Bolaji Akeim Toussaint Buck Andrew Gannon Angharad Pearce Jones Babeworld Bethany Stead Cassia Dodman Chrissy Ralph Claye Bowler Daniel&Clara Edwin Mingard Francis Whorrall-Campbell Gayle Chong Kwan Gemma Anderson-Tempini Glassball Studio Grace Clifford Hanna Tuulikki Harriet Bowman Jasmina Cibic Johann Don-Daniel Karanjit Panesar Karen Densham Kate Crumpler Kedisha Coakley Lauren Gault Liaqat Rasul Libby Bove Maya Rose Edwards Mohammad Barrangi Natasha MacVoy Philippa Brown Philomène Pirecki Rafał Zajko Rebecca Bellantoni Rebecca Chesney Rebecca Moss Rudy Kanhye Rudy Loewe Ruth Claxon Sahjan Kooner Sarah Roberts SHARP Stella Baraklianou Steven Claydon Vanessa da Silva Xin Liu
Abbas Zahedi
Abbas Zahedi is an artist with a background in medicine from University College London and an MA in Contemporary Photography and Philosophy from Central Saint Martins.
His practice engages with systems of care, thresholds of experience, and the shaping of communal spaces for dialogue. Interweaving personal narratives with broader social concerns, Zahedi works with sound and sculpture as mediums for reflection, resonance, and connection.
Zahedi is an Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art and has taught at universities across the UK and internationally.
Abi Palmer
Abi Palmer is an artist and writer. She uses sculpture, text, film and sensory intervention to explore sick bodies, viscous textures and ecological landscapes.
Her work includes Slime Mother (Chapter, Cardiff; Site, Sheffield), Abi Palmer Invents the Weather (Artangel), and Crip Casino (Tate Modern; Somerset House; Wellcome Collection). She is the author of Slugs: A Manifesto (Makina Books) and Sanatorium (Penned in the Margins).
Adébayo Bolaji
Adébayo Bolaji is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in London. At the centre of his practice is the dialogue of change and metaphysical conversations. Bolaji has exhibited internationally in London, Zurich, Berlin and New York.
He has participated in artist residencies including Yinka Shonibare MBE Guest Projects and recent residencies in New York, Margate, and, Jaipur, India.
A published poet, theatre director and founder of Ex Nihilo Theatre Group, Bolaji has a degree with the Central School of Speech and Drama, as well as a Law degree from London Guildhall University.
Akeim Toussaint Buck
Akeim Toussaint Buck is an interdisciplinary performer and maker, born in Jamaica and raised in England. He graduated from The Northern School of Contemporary Dance in 2014.
The aesthetic of Toussaint’s multidisciplinary work is informed by methodologies of kick boxing, Yoga, Capoeira, Caribbean Dance, Hip Hop and Contemporary Dance, with his performances aspiring to an orchestral musicality involving spoken word poetry, singing, and beatboxing.
With improvisation and acute listening at the core of his practice of vocality and movement, which he calls Beatmotion, the artist embraces the holistic potential of dance to translate the affective dimension of socio-political realities.
Andrew Gannon
Andrew Gannon is an artist whose work bridges performance and sculpture, using everyday gestures, moments and objects as the basis for his interventions.
Since 2019 his work has purposefully centred his disability, with specific focus on the space around upper limb prosthesis.
Borrowing a process of cast making used in the production of prosthesis, his recent works are made up of multiple plaster limb casts. Repeated and combined they gain weight and take up space, making solid the ambiguous space around limb difference and presenting the limb different/disabled body in its absence.
Some works combine casts with other objects, such as bungee cords or electrical cables, extending or tethering themselves. Some are painted in bright colours, which can’t be ignored. In other works, limb casts are set in plaster bases, trapped in formal geometry. The boxes they were formed in force the casts to close each other off, making them unwearable and halting their potential.
Actions too unwieldy not to fail result in formal sculpture made from a disabled point of view.
“In a cost-of-living crisis this award means the difference between being able to make work or not. This money will be put towards studio and materials costs, allowing me to make new work. It comes at a time when I am working towards an exhibition, We Contain Multitudes, at Dundee Contemporary Arts.
“The project aims to create systemic change in the visual arts sector in Scotland, tackling ableism in the sector and imagining a future in which disabled artists have increased access to opportunities, are visible, and their expertise and experiences are truly valued.
“I am grateful for this award, recognising work that is making disability visible in art.”
Andrew Gannon
Angharad Pearce Jones
Originally from Bala and a native Welsh speaker, Angharad Pearce Jones currently lives and works in rural West Wales. She graduated from Brighton University in 1991 with a BA in 3D Design and Craft, and completed an MA in Fine Art at Cardiff Art School in 1999.
Over a 30-year period she has exhibited regularly both in the UK and internationally, but maintained an ambivalent attitude towards the art world and has stayed away from commercial gallery representation until fairly recently. Although a regular visiting lecturer on many art college campuses, she has resisted offers of permanent teaching roles and supports her practice and family by working as a blacksmith and steel fabricator, stating that she “feels more comfortable on a construction site than in a lecture hall”.
Pearce Jones is currently one of Wales’s most prolific sculptors, having won the Gold Medal in Fine Art at the National Eisteddfod in Pontypridd 2024 and sited two new Public Art works in the last six months: the first for Unesco: North Wales Slate Mining Landscapes; and the other a CELF (National Contemporary Art Gallery for Wales) commission for the grounds of Ruthin Craft Centre.
“I will be using this very timely award to develop a new sculpture called Half way between Lloyd George and Jan Morris’s House, for an exhibition at Celf Gallery, Cardiff. It has been in my thoughts for a long time but I had no idea how to fund it.
“It is a delight to be able to move forward with this new piece without having to complete a lengthy and arduous funding application with several conditions attached.”
Angharad Pearce Jones
Babeworld
Babeworld are an art collective based across Stoke-on-Trent and London. Their work uses popular-culture inspired film, installation and sound design to interrogate themes of political and societal identity, disability, access, neurodivergence and race.
By using a tongue-in-cheek approach to serious themes, Babeworld are able to playfully explore these themes whilst capturing the lived-experiences within the collective. Underpinning this work is an ongoing commitment to researching what it means to make, participate in and spectate art as marginalised individuals.
Across their work, Babeworld aims to capture a life of contrast – one in which oscillating mental health, mania and delusion can make things feel hopeless and paralysing, or thrilling and obsessive.
Bethany Stead
Bethany Stead is an artist based in Newcastle upon Tyne. She graduated from Newcastle University in 2019, and participated in The NewBridge Project Collective Studio Programme 2020-21. She is a member of the North East artist collective Hypha.
Working across sculpture, painting and drawing, Stead draws upon allegory, iconography, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, sci-fi and philosophy. Using clay, cloth, paper and wood, she weaves visual stories which challenge and disrupt our socio-political fabric.
Stead’s figures and beings transgress category, residing within unsettling or idyllic inner landscapes, merged with personal archetype and symbol. She attempts to explore the discomfort and awkwardness of inhabiting bodies, both biological and artificial, the history of bodily health, the resonance of textiles and garment, notions of worship and religion, and relationships with the non-human through the lens of social class.
Cassia Dodman
Cassia Dodman is a visual artist currently living and working in Orkney, Scotland. Her work uses industrial, repurposed and elemental materials and processes to explore human impact on local ecologies, fluctuating peripheries and water phenomena.
Cassia graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in 2017 with a BA in Fine Art and since has worked and exhibited throughout Scotland, including at the RSA New Contemporaries and at the Pier Arts Centre in the exhibition Inside Landscape – the natural environment observed by women artists. She has completed a residency at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop, and has been awarded two VACMA awards to support her studio practice. Recently she has led a number of community workshops focused on sustainable materials.
“This award will have a huge impact, allowing me to develop my practice at a time where the form of my work is changing. The award will give me the flexibility to work in an appropriate workshop space and go towards developing a new body of work. This will allow me to arrange my first solo exhibition, which is a goal of mine.
“I have struggled recently with exhibiting and making work due to monetary reasons and limited access to space, where making work and investing in the use of facilities often isn’t feasible unless a set outcome is already in place. The opportunity to experiment with materials is core to my work, and this will allow me the breathing space to move my practice forward.”
Cassia Dodman
Chrissy Ralph
Chrissy Ralph is a performance artist, researcher, and materials enthusiast. She is also a mother of four and a library assistant. Coming from a working-class background, Ralph is the first of her family to attend university, achieving a Fine Art BA in 2014 and an MA in 2022. Now a second-year PhD student based at Norwich University of the Arts, her practice-as-research explores potential for equitable collaboration with an object through a posthuman reading of domestic space.
Ralph’s practice interrogates slippage between body, space, and structure. She has a fascination with viscous materials which have an impetus of their own: their changing states reflecting body and environment in flux. She admires performance and sculpture that dictate their own narrative, no matter how outside bodies try to manipulate them.
Ralph explores interconnectedness through personal spatial concerns and material languages, seeking to understand wider structures through a feminist lens. She is driven by the excitement of unknown outcomes created through unplanned actions between objects and the performing body.
Claye Bowler
Claye Bowler is an artist based in the UK. His practice centres on collection and documentation of experience, memory and the remnants of humanity.
Bowler uses sculptural practices to highlight stories that are not historically collected through institutional means, often working with narratives of queerness and disability.
Whilst also working in museum registration, Bowler often incorporates, yet questions, the ethics, administration and aesthetics of museum collecting in his work.
Bowler has a strong connection to sound and music, increasingly integrating these elements into his work, using field recordings and traditional British folk song.
He was recipient of ACE DYCP Grant (2023) and Jerwood New Work Fund (2023) and ACE Project Grant (2024). His work is held in public collections, including Arts Council Collection, Wellcome Collection, Otherness Archive, and Leeds Art Gallery.
“This award has come at a really apt time as a couple of projects come to a close and will give me breathing space and support whilst I relocate back to Yorkshire, the capital of sculpture.
“I am hoping to set up a new studio and project space with opportunity for queer and trans artists to stay with me in a rural setting to explore, discuss and create together.”
Claye Bowler
Daniel&Clara
Since meeting in 2010, Daniel & Clara have dedicated themselves to a shared life of creative experimentation, working across moving image, photography, installation and mail art to explore the nature of human experience, perception and reality.
Often emerging from encounters with sites in the British landscape that are rich in personal or cultural resonance, the artists create multifaceted works about the experience of being alive with all our complex layers of fear, desire, memory and imagination. At its core, their practice is a meditation on the human search for meaning and the ways we attempt to make sense of our existence during our brief time on this planet.
They are currently creating a new body of work about wildness, as it exists in nature and within ourselves.
Edwin Mingard
Edwin Mingard is a socially-engaged visual artist. He works with moving and still image, and installation, often playing with mainstream and accessible forms. He is interested in who makes work, how, why, for whom, and why that matters.
Mingard often produces work within a discrete community or interest group, making work with a personal connection to his collaborators and broader social relevance. He aims to celebrate and make visible the joy of the making process itself, and explore its value for individual and collective growth and change. This focus is mirrored in the subject matter of his work, which deals with themes around our social environment and relationships with one another.
“The kind of work I make (collaborative and developed over extended periods of time) is particularly hard to fund. The fact that the Award can be used for any purpose means I can put it towards parts of my practice that arts commissioning won’t support.
“It could not have come at a better time as I have a long term project that faces a funding shortfall, and the Award will allow me to continue developing it through this period. I will be able to focus on the project without distraction at this critical time.”
Edwin Mingard
Francis Whorrall-Campbell
Francis Whorrall-Campbell is an artist, writer, and sometimes art critic from the UK. Working across text, sculpture and digital, their work undertakes a materialist investigation of sexual subjectivity.
Guided by research into the pasts and presents of gender transition, a relationship between making an artwork and making a (gendered) self emerges as a method of thinking critically about how identities and desires are formed in interaction with the world and narratives around them.
His work has been shown in recent exhibitions at The Ryder Projects, Madrid (2025); Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt (2025); and Bologna.cc, Amsterdam (2025).
Gayle Chong Kwan
Gayle Chong Kwan is a British artist who works at the intersection of historical, material, and future-oriented research.
She explores complex colonial and diasporic legacies, ecological degradation, and the politics of production, consumption, and waste in relation to the human and more than human.
In her work she uses waste materials, archival and documentary sources, sculptural collages, sensory rituals and experiences, and works worn or performed on the body. Her installations, sculpture, photography, print, video, ritual, and mixed reality work have been shown internationally.
Her practice is rooted in her severe visual myopia and encompasses ideas of near and far, contrasts between details, edges, and sculptural forms. Her work positions the viewer as one element in a cosmology of objects, moments, and experiences.
Gemma Anderson-Tempini
Gemma Anderson-Tempini uses drawing and sculpture as mediums to investigate processes that are beyond traditional observation, such as higher-dimensional geometry and string theory. Her work often results in collaboration with scientists and scientific labs.
In 2015, she completed a practice-based PhD at the University of the Arts London, which led to two peer-reviewed books with Intellect Press: ‘Drawing as a Way of Knowing in Art and Science’ (2017) and ‘Drawing Processes of Life’ (2023).
She has conducted numerous collaborative projects across the borders of art and science, including a Wellcome Trust Arts Award (2009), and a Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence award at Imperial College London (2012).
Glassball Studio
Visual artists David Ball and Cora Glasser formed Glassball Studio as an interdisciplinary arts practice, working collaboratively in the space of art, architecture and social practice.
Their artworks exist mostly as temporary and outside of the traditional gallery, from research-based participatory projects, photography, video and audio, to sculptural and two dimensional mark-making.
They are interested in how places exist and what continues to shape them: class, ownership, marks left from past decisions, working with glimpses and dialogues both internal and external that at times are fragile and intangible.
Glassball Studio is currently developing a series of temporary public artworks in Lancashire and Derbyshire, looking at the relationship between museum collections and working-class lived experience.
Grace Clifford
Grace Clifford works underneath an old factory in Sheffield. Labour is intrinsic to her making, led by an innate subconscious desire she believes has been carved out for her by her forebears. Currently working with scrap metal, the body, horses, chocolate and plastic water bottles, Grace forms her own language of storytelling and unspoken rituals.
In 2023, Grace was in residence at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, supported by Working Class Creatives. In 2024 she was in residence at Yorkshire Artspace and took part in Abingdon Studios WORK/LEISURE programme, culminating in her 2025 solo show Thine is the Kingdom.
Hanna Tuulikki
Hanna Tuulikki is a British-Finnish artist, composer and performer based in Scotland. She specialises in working with the body to tell ‘stories’ about reworlding in times of biospheric crisis.
Her work often blends vocal composition with costumed choreography, sculptural props, visual scores and drawings, within live performance, film and audiovisual installation.
Investigating the ways in which the body communicate before and beyond words, her multi-disciplinary projects tell stories through imitation, vocalisation and gesture. With a largely place-responsive process, she considers how bodily relationships and folk histories are encoded within specific environments, ecologies and places.
Her most recent work engages with vital questions about what it means to live on a damaged planet, proposing contemporary, queer ritual as a means to process the trauma that comes with ecological awareness.
“With the rising cost of living, my studio rent recently doubled, and I have been struggling to meet this new financial demand. I am so grateful for this nomination, which will allow me to sustain the cost of my studio for a number of months, allowing me to focus on my practice.”
Hanna Tuulikki
Harriet Bowman
Harriet Bowman makes sculpture through an intensive process of learning, testing and experimentation. Her work examines the vulnerability of the body in relation to materials and the bodies of others used within the processes of production.
Embedding herself in industry, Bowman takes on an investigatory role to learn how materials behave, understand where they have come from and where they may end up, and find their boundaries.
Her bodies of work swell, ready to burst, densely packed with layers that go beyond a singular representation of an event. Bowman delves deeply into understanding the particulars of material, character and all that surround it.
She has a Studio at Spike Island, where she is also a trustee, and lectures on the BA Fine Art course at the University West of England.
Jasmina Cibic
Jasmina Cibic is a London-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans installation, sculpture, and film. Her work examines how culture is instrumentalised by the state as a tool of soft power, particularly in moments of ideological or political crisis.
Through research-driven projects that intertwine archival material, political rhetoric, and allegorical staging, Cibic exposes the entanglements of art, architecture, gender, and national identity.
Often playing a double role as analyst and storyteller, she constructs seductive visual worlds that mirror – and critique – the mechanisms of cultural diplomacy.
Cibic represented Slovenia at the 55th Venice Biennale and has presented exhibitions at institutions including BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, MOMA New York, and the Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana.
Johann Don-Daniel
Sonic artist Johann Don-Daniel combines handmade instruments, electronic components and sculptural elements to create interactive installations, performances and soundscapes.
Through ethnographic research, he explores traditional skills and languages that have been affected by colonisation. Central to this investigation are Sri Lankan drum legacies, particularly Thamattama rhythms, examined from his perspective as a second-generation British artist. These research outcomes manifest as experimental technologies, sound distortion, sculpture, and beat-driven narratives where drums and resonance play pivotal roles.
Recent projects include Many a Slip Betwixt Cup ‘n’ Lip, which investigates the neo-colonial effects of tea, experimenting with sounds of teaspoons stirring and decorative China, housed within reimagined tea chests. The interplay between hidden technology and visitor interaction remains crucial to his work.
Karanjit Panesar
Karanjit Panesar is an artist and filmmaker. In his practice, oblique explorations of identity intersect with a structural concern. With an interest in story-telling and narrative, his work frequently operates at the edges of fact and fiction.
Often starting from moving image, he constructs stylised and layered installations that contain sculpture and other media. Environments, ideas and objects spill into and out of the space of the screen; artworks are in some way incomplete, asked to be more than one thing at once.
Recent solo presentations include: Furnace Fruit, Leeds Art Gallery (2024); Clarence Pier, Aspex Portsmouth (2022); and Parts of Wholes, Workplace Foundation, Newcastle (2022).
Karen Densham
Karen Densham’s work explores the tensions and boundaries between decorative objects, sexual innuendo, cultural norms, humour and etiquette – playing with the portent that lies within the scale of the miniature and diminutive.
She makes work that is exquisite and precise – a curl or a wiggle is in just the right place to make things uncomfortable and full of meaning, to make you look twice and look again.
Densham studied ceramics at the Royal College of Art, and at The Polytechnic, Wolverhampton, and currently lives and works in Suffolk.
Her solo shows include: Poor Form, The Art Station, Suffolk (2025); Waiting For Something Better To Come Along, Richard Saltoun Gallery, London (2022); and Form & Disfunction, The Minories, Essex (2015).
Kate Crumpler
Kate Crumpler is a London-based artist specialising in large-scale sculpture. Her works are bold, theatrical and sensitive, attempting to make the unseen not just seen, but substantial: bringing aspects of the invisible spiritual realm into dramatic material form and into the forefront of our perception.
Crumpler sees her practice as primarily a form of healing. As an artist experiencing access needs, art allows her to process and digest daily experiences.
Her sculptures are multi-sensory, designed to be experienced with the whole body to engender a deeper sense of acceptance and connection.
Kedisha Coakley
Kedisha Coakley is a Sheffield-based artist of Caribbean descent. Her practice explores the intertwined themes of Black identity and erased histories, creating interconnected works that challenge dominant colonial narratives.
Through printmaking, photography and sculpture, Coakley reconsiders objects and cultural symbols, reframing ideas of history, race and culture. Investigating the overlooked, she remixes aesthetics, techniques, and cultural references throughout her work.
Viewing her practice as an intervention rather than a response, she explores the complexities of popular cultural narratives and what they say about archival silences and omissions.
“The awarding of this grant will be instrumental in alleviating the financial burden associated with my artistic practice, particularly as the rising costs of studio space have significantly impacted my ability to focus on production and experimentation.
“With the increasing expenses, facing the challenging prospect of diverting funds away from creative development to cover basic operational costs, which threatened to hinder my ability to explore innovative sculptural ideas.
“This generous, unrestricted grant will provide much-needed financial flexibility, allowing me to dedicate more time and resources to pushing the boundaries of my work without the constant concern of budget constraints. Empowering me to pursue new sculptural concepts, experiment with materials, and develop projects that I might not have otherwise been able to undertake.
“I am deeply grateful for this support, which not will sustain my practice but also inspire me to continue creating and exploring new artistic territories. The opportunity to innovate freely and focus on my artistic growth is invaluable, and I look forward to producing work that reflects this encouragement and the confidence it has instilled in me.
“This grant truly makes a meaningful difference in my artistic journey, Thank you.”
Kedisha Coakley
Lauren Gault
Lauren Gault is a Glasgow-based artist working in sculpture, installation, text, and sound.
Her work is research-led and process-driven, considering the political, ethical and emotional implications of our changing interactions with matter and the environment.
Engaging with multiple fields – including agri-policies, biomaterials, archaeology, and sound-image composition – her practice, active in its uncanny materiality, seeks to expand critical discussions around material sentience, future agri-relations and radical human/non-human interconnectivity.
Liaqat Rasul
Liaqat Rasul makes collage works about community and mental health stories. Inspired by his multicultural background, they have a personal and cartographic quality.
He works with tactile analogue materials, such as old envelopes, stamped tickets, wooden coffee stirrers, misplaced printing on cardboard boxes, yarn, price tags, even old t-shirts. They are stapled, sellotaped, glued and stitched together, and worked over with biros and felt-tip pens.
With their low tech and bold textures, odd colours and real-world experiences, Rasul’s work creates vibrant, buoyant tableaux.
Libby Bove
Libby Bove is an artist and designer working across a range of media including ceramics, textiles, sculpture and photography. Her work is centred on repositioning folk customs and magical practices at the forefront of daily life.
Drawing on archival methodologies and documentary, her work slips between fact and fiction. By employing traditional craft processes, plausibility is woven into constructed myths; transposing ideas of ancient customs, traditions and rituals into incongruous contemporary settings, non-existent pasts and speculative future landscapes.
A central theme within her practice is Roadside Magic, an imagined construct where plant knowledge, magic and ritual play essential roles in the repair and maintenance of vehicles. Inspired by Albion’s rich history of folk magic, alongside her own lived experience of life on the road, both professionally and domestically, Roadside Magic seeks to re-establish the valuable role of everyday ritual.
“Receiving this award is hugely welcome. In the year since graduating university , I have begun to learn what It means to be a full time freelance artist – chasing funding bids, applying to open calls, creating merchandise and undertaking any work I can to keep things rolling.
“The precarity of this work environment is exhausting, and the short term nature of most projects, means that It’s hard to plan into the future. Receiving this award will allow me to dedicate time solely to the creation of new work, earmarking time to research and make without the stress of financial pressure hanging over me.”
Libby Bove
Maya Rose Edwards
Maya Rose Edwards is a visual artist whose work encompasses research-based collaborations, fieldwork, site specific intervention, live art, sculpture and participatory encounters.
Her public artworks focus on the politics of place, rural culture, acts of landmarking, and queer ecologies, fostering a sense of reflection and resistance.
She is drawn to rural culture and its ability to engage communities with their landscapes. Centring forgotten or disadvantaged sites to re-envision a sense of place and community, her work interrogates a belief that agriculture and industry are an extension to the legacy of land art, a sculptural form of protest.
Mohammad Barrangi
Mohammad Barrangi is a multidisciplinary Iranian artist currently based in Leeds, UK. His practice merges Persian calligraphy, miniature painting, and modern illustration into a powerful, symbolic visual language.
Born with a physical disability affecting one side of his body, Barrangi has developed a unique approach to artmaking that explores themes of identity, storytelling, and displacement, often drawing on myth and memory. His use of hand-drawn lines, printmaking, and collage reveals an intimate connection between personal experience and creative expression.
Through an evolving practice that includes sculpture and installation, Barrangi continues to create art that bridges cultures and challenges conventions – offering deeply personal yet universally resonant reflections on movement, belonging, and transformation.
Natasha MacVoy
Natasha MacVoy is a visual artist and educator whose practice includes writing, ceramics, murals, performance and film to create installations and environments.
Her work is a generous, gentle and complex study of mothering, identity, loss, gain and unconditional love through the lens of neurodiversity.
Drawing on her own experience of using the studio as a template for home educating, she is interested in adaptative care and learning in a broken system, shared expertise as protection and hope through radical connection.
Philippa Brown
Philippa Brown is a multidisciplinary artist looking through portals and hovering between enlightenment, fantasy and bogus wisdom.
She makes sculpture, installations and paintings as a means to explore the ambiguous, magical and sometimes fragile interconnectedness between histories, materials, beliefs and bodies of all kinds, imagining, making, reusing and exploring materiality and other realms along the way.
Based in Cardiff, Philippa completed an MFA in 2019 and has since developed her creative practice with support from Freelands Foundation, g39, Jerwood Foundation and Arts Council Wales.
Philomène Pirecki
Philomène Pirecki (b. Jersey, Channel Islands) is a multidisciplinary artist based in London working with sound, photography, painting and objects. Her work addresses the temporalities and impermanence of lived experience, cycles of life, decay and transformation.
Her sonic practice is built around bodily rhythms and energetic frequencies, percussive basslines generated from her own heartbeats in multiple intensities and bpm’s, alongside breathing, vocalisations and phonetic drones captured in various emotional and physical states. These are interspersed with electromagnetic frequencies sonically sculpted from the air and binaural brainwave tones, to consider the body and environment as an electrically charged energetic conduit.
Pirecki recently launched Gates of Vanitas, an experimental editions label across multiple forms including metalwork, ceramics, prints, photography, clothing, and sound; it was founded on the principle of establishing an equitable model for an additional income stream for artists.
Rafał Zajko
Rafał Zajko is a Polish artist who lives and works in London.
He holds a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art, London (2012), and an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, London (2020).
Recent exhibitions include The Spin Off, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (2025); Returnity, British School at Rome (2024); and CLOCKING OFF, Queercircle, London, (2023).
Rebecca Bellantoni
To Whom It May Concern.
I was a London child.
Making alters to concrete long before the green.
Tethered.
To foundations laid long before.
Do you see?
My alters glow, depth dark.Looking forward,
Rebecca Bellantoni
Bellantoni’s recent projects/performances/exhibitions include her solo show Day and heavy, Judah leaves at De La Warr pavilion (2024), Condition the roses, accept the vision. C.R.Y, Tate Britain, London (2023); La Position de l’Amour, CNAC Magasin, Grenoble (2023); In the house of my love, Brent Biennial, London (2022); Frieze Live London (2021).
Rebecca Chesney
Rebecca Chesney’s work is concerned with the politics of landscape: economics and wealth, social issues and justice, and the effects these have on natural ecologies and people.
She uses many methods to gather information, from visiting archives, utilising open source data, to talking to community members and documenting flora and fauna through sound, video and drawing. The resulting work takes the form of installations, interventions, maps, and large-scale living sculptures in the landscape.
Recent works include commissions for the Harewood Biennial (2024) in collaboration with the British Textile Biennial (2023); Hestercombe Gallery, Somerset (2023); and HOME, Manchester (2023). She is currently Art and Horticulture artist in residence at Hospitalfield in Scotland.
Rebecca Moss
Rebecca Moss is an artist based in Essex. Tackling notions of absurdity and precarity, her work takes a variety of forms across sculpture, video, performance, installation, and participatory practice.
Through humorous ideas, she explores existential themes. A sense of movement recurs across the work, that things are in a state of change and flux. She is especially inspired by slapstick performance: for its emotional expression of feelings of instability, its lowbrow humorous associations, its sense of reciprocity between body and surroundings, and for its potential to challenge power.
In an ongoing series of videos, she stages absurd interventions in the landscape, which she performs to the camera. These works emphasise site-responsive interactions between human gestures, elemental forces, architecture and the natural world. She sets up scenarios where she relinquishes a degree of control, and the outcome is often surprising.
Rudy Kanhye
Rudy Kanhye is a disabled artist, descendant of indentured labourers sent from India to work on colonial sugar plantations in East Africa and Mauritius. Born in Dijon, France, to a Portuguese mother and a Mauritian father, his childhood dual culture, mixed-race heritage and working-class background influence his practice.
He explores memory as a form of resistance, empowerment, empathy, and solidarity, fuelled by research and a commitment to communities that have faced traumas caused by colonialism, war, and displacement.
Through his engagement with vanishing or vanquished historical memory, Kanhye investigates the erasures that the colonial project has imposed on certain parts of the world. His work combines the present, the future, and the past with poetry, experimenting with the timelessness of certain symbols, intercultural gestures, and technologies.
His work spans print, painting, video, and performance, navigating the complexities of migration and memory while addressing gaps and silences within the colonial archive. His work often consists of the investigation of language and the re-contextualisation of history through appropriated imagery.
Fluent in both English and French, he is interested in how language and images are translated, what is communicated, lost or added. His intuitive blend of drawing, painting, and digital collage, crafted from archival images, offers a heartfelt glimpse into the complex nature of storytelling, archives, and the biases inherent in historical narratives.
Rudy Loewe
Rudy Loewe is a multidisciplinary artist who blends painting, drawing, and sculpture to examine a complex web of socio-political dynamics. Through their work, Loewe brings to life histories unearthed through archival research and interviews.
Loewe presents figures from African and Caribbean folklore, such as Anansi, known as a spider and a trickster. A recurring character in Loewe’s work, Anasi is reimagined as a gender-nonconforming shapeshifter that breaks and decodes heteronormative structures, embracing fluidity and the unknown.
Loewe’s practice-based PhD research critiques Britain’s role in suppressing Black resistance movements in the English-speaking Caribbean during the 60s and 70s. They unravel these histories, which are included in recently declassified Foreign & Commonwealth Office records, into large-scale paintings. One painting from the ‘Trinidad’ series was transformed into a steel sculpture for the 2023 Liverpool Biennial and is now situated on the Baltic Triangle Plinth on Jamaica Street, Liverpool.
In 2025, Loewe will be the ninth exhibiting artist for the Art on the Underground Brixton Mural Programme. Their upcoming work honours the historic role that Brixton has played as a gathering space, particularly for London’s Black communities, adding another layer to Loewe’s ongoing exploration of culture, identity, resistance, and collective memory.
Ruth Claxon
Ruth Claxton’s practice takes a variety of forms. She makes artworks for herself, exhibitions and public spaces, as well as supporting infrastructure for artists through initiatives such as STEAMhouse and The Syllabus, and Eastside Projects, which she co-founded in 2008.
In the studio she has most recently been marking time and thinking about getting older, visibility, and what it means to be with objects and physical material in space when so much around us has become intangible.
Over the last couple of years she has been making thin, performative sculptures with fugitive surfaces that appear and disappear as bodies move around them, and transform when captured in digital space by a flash-enabled camera phone.
Sahjan Kooner
Sahjan Kooner has recently been exploring their ancestral village in North India and its future(s). Using a lens of science fiction and fantasy, their work blends personal experience with technology and ecology.
Kooner works with a collaborative and contaminated approach to infect and alter the histories and future speculations of the site. They conjure a visitation of the village which delves into the lineage of the lives, mutations, migrations, technologies and sociologies of the inhabitants of the village.
Using video and installation, they create expansive worlds that explore the traces of love, hope and nation, along with examining a debris of questions around the technological, social and economic structures that augment life.
Sarah Roberts
Sarah Roberts is a Welsh artist, living and working in Leeds and London. She works with objects, media and images, amassing them into installations and multimedia works spanning sculpture, scent, sound, drawing, collage, and text.
Roberts draws inspiration from everyday life – from beachfront cafes and casinos to hospital beds, combining industrial leftovers like plaster, plastic, domestic detritus, ceramics and glass, to create new regenerative environments on an architectural scale.
By creating playful spaces loaded with underpinning ecological concerns, her work questions the value we place on objects.
Roberts originally trained as a sociologist, with personal experience of familial hoarding and estate clearance. This is reflected in her obsessive taxonomies and non-hierarchical approach to installation, and the duality in her work; trying to simplify things by producing a mass complexity of material.
“This award comes at a timely moment, I have been progressing my use of hot glass and casting techniques plus the manipulation of metal frames for sculpture. This award will allow me to continue to develop my material alphabet in this way and better articulate ideas that have been developing from my most recent works.
“I can now also dedicate an allocated period to research; I will be focusing on communication and its speed, going back to Wales to investigate the Marconi receiving station and its bungalows in my home village, and to visit the archives in Aberystwyth. This funding will help me continue my practice and to develop with purpose.”
Sarah Roberts
SHARP
A queer, working class, socially engaged artist, producer and activist, SHARP’s interdisciplinary approach moves between sculpture, experimental video, photography, sound installations and public interventions, often with performance as a means to occupy space.
While researching and exploring the human condition through a queer lens, they create works that contemplate gender, sexuality, death, loss, illness, displacement, isolation and ways of remembrance from a personal perspective as well as a collective experience.
“I make personal work as a Dyke and GenderQueer artist as a means to explore and understand my own identity and because I do not see myself reflected in art history.
“Queer people have to document and share our own stories and histories; we have to create something from nothing in a hetero-normative society that doesn’t understand who we are.
“I have always worked as an artist as a necessity and have been part of DIY movements to make things happen. My life has been my material – and I believe in the personal as political.”
SHARP
Stella Baraklianou
Stella Baraklianou is a British-based Greek artist, who grew up in Australia. Her practice encompasses site-specific installation, sculpture, ceramics and photography.
The sculptural coiled vessels she creates contain a variety of influences, from her Greek heritage and personal journeys of travel and migration to contemporary references of chance, precarity and invisible algorithms. Slanting, leaning, bulging, protruding and hovering, the sculptures have textured and raw qualities – a response to the real and virtual adjustments of our times.
Baraklianou holds a practice-based PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London (2007) and an MA in Photographic Studies, University of Westminster (2002).
Steven Claydon
Steven Claydon is a British artist who lives and works in Cornwall.
He holds a BA in Fine Art: Painting from Chelsea School of Art & Design, London (1991), and an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, London, (1997).
Recent exhibitions include The End of Europe, Kingsgate Project Space, London (2022); Lacrimosa, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2021); and St Just, KIMMERICH, Berlin, Germany (2019).
Vanessa da Silva
Vanessa da Silva is a London-based artist working across sculpture, installation, and performance.
Informed by her experience as a Latin American immigrant in the UK, her multidisciplinary practice explores how bodies and identities shift within changing cultural landscapes, focusing on themes of migration, identity, and displacement.
Drawing on influences such as Brazilian art history, natural elements, dance, and choreography, da Silva investigates the relationship between the body and its environment to reflect on Brazilian identity and otherness.
Her work considers the spaces between nationalities and the complex borders where identities and cultures meet, overlap, and coexist.
Xin Liu
Xin Liu is an artist and engineer known for her genre-crossing approach to dissecting the epistemology of science and technology.
Her work explores the tensions and reconciliations between systems and the individual. She creates installations, sculptures, films, and generative digital worlds that reclaim the narratives of space exploration and immigration, biotechnology and motherhood, petroleum and land, neural networks and dreams.
Her current research centres on Cosmic Metabolism – the metabolism of our planet and how it has been affected by technological infrastructures over the past few decades.
Xin is currently an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute, a Visiting Fellow at Cornell Tech (2024-25), and the founding Arts Curator for the Space Exploration Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. She also serves as an advisor for the LACMA Art + Tech Lab.
“I’m honoured to receive this generous support from The Henry Moore Foundation. The grant will provide valuable space for reflection, research, and the continued development of my artistic practice. I’m excited to see where this opportunity will lead.”
Xin Liu