Announcing RCA2026: School of Arts & Humanities Show

From 18-21 June, the RCA’s Battersea campus will open its doors to the public, showcasing the creative work of graduating students from across the School of Arts and Humanities. Featured programmes include MFA Arts & Humanities, MA Ceramics & Glass, MA Contemporary Art Practice, MA Curating Contemporary Art, MA Jewellery & Metal, MA Painting, MA Photography, MA Print, MA Sculpture and MA Writing. There will be live performances and events taking place across the exhibition spaces.

Across the School of Arts & Humanities exhibitions, student work includes:

Calder MacKay (MA Painting) explores the emotional resonance of imagery, operating in the space between painting and photography to unpick the overstimulation and quiet alienation of contemporary life. Working from found archival and digital imagery, he uses exaggerated saturation, distortion and overexposure to transform familiar scenes into uncanny reflections on modern unease.

Harriet Rutter (MA Photography) experiments with the intersection of ecology and analogue photography, looking at the visible and invisible aspects of forests. Harriet documents the tranquility of Oxford’s woods before processing and burying her film beneath the very beech tree she photographs. The resulting images are a collaboration with nature, marked by traces of mycelium and soil microbes.

Isabella Lozano (MA Print) interrogates themes of displacement, identity, and belonging through a multidisciplinary practice spanning print, installation, photography, and sculpture. Her work ‘I am a jug,’ where she poses as a juice jug, playfully blends documentary and fiction, using mismatched cultural symbols to reflect on migration and exportation, whether of ideas, images, people, or goods.

Sophie de Carvalho’s (MA Ceramics & Glass) practice highlights the sensory and emotional experience of encountering the natural world, evoking a sense of wonder and ‘shimmering aliveness.’ Sophie creates a tactile landscape of undulating sensory objects: precious metals cling to gleaming glazes, droplets of glass glint like raindrops on rocky surfaces as if captured in a moment of transformation.

Grounded in meditation and somatic practice, Anna Aristova’s (MA Sculpture) work interrogates creativity in the era of AI, proposing intimacy, slowness, and human connection as urgent acts of resistance. The installation ‘Space for 2’ invites visitors into one-to-one encounters within a shared emotional archive of letterpressed texts that consider ‘What is intimacy?’ and handmade paper created from recycled ropes which reflect the fragile and time-intensive nature of human relationships.

Cindy (Xinyi) Wu’s (MA Jewellery & Metal) practice explores jewellery as wearable sculpture, combining innovative materials with traditional techniques to create works shaped by the body, emotion and narrative. ‘Almost Under Control’ is inspired by unstable balance, failed tools and studio frustrations, transforming familiar actions such as taking, pulling and setting into moments of tension, uncertainty and fragile control.

Wing-Hung Lit, (MFA Arts & Humanities) is interested in how individuals and communities navigate displacement, uncertainty, and adaptation, revealing the fragile infrastructures that sustain contemporary life. Her installation ‘Conditional Home’ uses inflatables, steel scaffolding, and changing light to turn domestic furniture into a shifting environment that mirrors the precarity of contemporary housing conditions shaped by mobility, rental systems, and instability.

Drawing on his rural roots, Aidan Robertson (MA Contemporary Art Practice) examines the tensions of digitised, city-based life by viewing humanity, nature, and technology as a single interconnected system. Through speculative structures and otherworldly desert landscapes, his current practice is a defense of the digital ‘soul’ aiming to protect vulnerable human memories in an era of AI exploitation and data harvesting.

The MA Curating Contemporary Art cohort has responded to the 50th anniversary of leading arts publication Art Monthly, developing a diverse curatorial programme of commissions, conversations, installations, performances and printed matter that connects archival research and the publication's history with today’s contemporary challenges and concerns. Seven curatorial projects explore questions of labour, translation, speculation, infrastructures and unfolding.

The MA Writing programme will host live readings highlighting the diverse voices and boundary-pushing work of the graduating students. An accompanying exhibition will showcase a collection of audio projects that draw inspiration from the rich archives of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

Additionally, an exhibition titled ‘The Art of Urgency’ will bring work by 20 artists from across the School’s programmes into dialogue. Taking place in RCA Battersea’s central hangar space, the exhibition explores the many ways that art urges us to pay attention, come closer, stand back, look deeper, take action and take time. Exploring a wide breadth of issues, including identity and belonging, cross-species relations, conflict, displacement, resilience and resistance, home and memory and decolonial cosmologies, these artworks urge you metaphorically, and in some cases literally, to enter and dwell in the complexity of urgency.

On 14 July at the V&A Museum, students from the V&A/RCA MA History of Design programme will present the ‘Pencils Only’ Symposium, a series of panels and presentations exploring what it means to ‘make a mark’ through their collective work with topics ranging from the material culture of 1990s Jungle rave culture to the birth of the mantua dress.

Free and open to the public, the official schedule for RCA2026 can be accessed here.

A selection of works from RCA2026 graduating students will be available for purchase through RCA Sales, a special sales platform, which will be open from Wednesday 17 June until Monday 20 July.