Graduate Prizes from the School of Arts & Humanities 2026

Labyrinth Photographic

Harriet Rutter

Harriet Rutter 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.

Anna Taylor

Through photographs and writing, this work examines projection as both a photographic and psychological process. Developed through repeated encounters with her late father's photographic archive, it considers how attention, memory and prolonged looking shape the meanings we find in images and objects.

New Photography Prize 2026

Ruonan Shen

Come Back to Me explores the artist's childhood memories of growing up in the countryside and the emotional connection they share with their grandparents’ home. By photographing familiar spaces and objects that have remained unchanged for decades, the artist uses photography to preserve fragments of memory and reconnect with a place that is slowly disappearing.

Thomas Lake

Kitchen Sink Realism is inspired by the cleaning process within photography and the kitchen sink genre within cinema where repetitive routines and domestic spaces are frequently depicted.

Trinity Ellis

Permitted Contact works from found photographs in the US government's military archive, looking at institutionalised masculinity and the forms of physical contact permitted between men within structures of power. Each image is worked over and scraped back until the photograph starts behaving like paint.

Zanne Chaudry

Working from photographs made by the artist's uncle during the Mourning of Muharram in Pakistan, Zanne Chaudhry subjects documentary images to sustained analogue darkroom interventions. Through an alchemical engagement with photographic materiality, the work interrogates ritual, spiritual ecstasy, and mysticism, positioning the darkroom as a site where documentary testimony is transformed into metaphysical inquiry.

Special Mention: Wanqi Zhu

A Deep Spring by Wanqi Zhu is an analogue photographic work exploring the relationship between memory, emotion, and distance. Created as a visual diary during a period of personal reflection, the work combines layered black-and-white film negatives to reveal the coexistence of dreams, reality, and memories across different places and times.

Special Mention: Mohammed Mharram

This documentary project captures the wheat planting and harvest seasons in the village of Khoza'a, east of Khan Younis. Photographed in 2019, the images depict male and female farmers working side by side in the fields — a scene that reflects the spirit of cooperation and mutual support characteristic of Palestinian agricultural life, and the enduring bond between the people and their land, despite all hardships.

Rapid Eye Darkrooms Award

Felix Cuvillier

Are you there? by Felix Cuvillier is a series of ten photograms made in the darkroom, in which the paper's own transformation - from white to black through the accumulation of light - becomes the work's subject and its grief. Circles and geometric forms, shaped by light alone, trace a cycle of presence and absence, each print held at the moment just before the paper dies and goes black.

Thomas Lake

Kitchen Sink Realism is inspired by the cleaning process within photography and the kitchen sink genre within cinema where repetitive routines and domestic spaces are frequently depicted.

Genesis Imaging Award

Lisa Marie Asubonteng

Psalm 16 is a series of self-portraits made in Ghana's Ashanti Region, staging ritual, inheritance, and devotion through gesture, cloth, and land. Moving through arrival, rootedness, transmission, surrender, and proclamation, the work traces a body remembering what it was taught before language, generations folding into a single motion held across time. Neither performance nor documentary, the images sit closer to prayer made visible. Made from faith, not theory, Psalm 16 asks what it means to be planted somewhere and still choose to stand.

Soup Film Lab

Mohammed Nateel

From the Sea to the River (2026) is a spatial photographic installation exploring memory, survival, and hunger between Gaza and London. Through suspended photographic works and personal narratives, the project examines how the experiences of genocide continue to shape identity, belonging, and memory across different places.

Travers Smith CSR Art Programme

Rebecca Lily

To Hold, To Carry asks how a woman carries hope, bodily conflict and devotion in a body expected to produce life, and questions what that devotion looks like when it goes unfulfilled.

Zhongting Sun

The Blue Archive of Clay is a contemporary art project rooted in traditional Chinese Yixing teapot culture, adopting typological creative methodology and realised through handcrafted cyanotype medium. The work breaks away from the traditional craft-oriented display method, transforms the traditional Chinese ceramic cultural heritage into a contemporary concept archive, and explores how the long-standing Chinese cultural symbols can be interpreted and re-conterted in the context of international contemporary art.

Trinity Ellis

Permitted Contact works from found photographs in the US government's military archive, looking at institutionalised masculinity and the forms of physical contact permitted between men within structures of power. Each image is worked over and scraped back until the photograph starts behaving like paint.

Imprint Art Fair Award

Laura Townsend

Symptoms of the Present develops a fictional botanical taxonomy of contemporary emotional states through two interconnected bodies of work: a herbarium series that classifies modern feelings and After Ruysch, a reimagined Dutch still life that observes them within the natural world. Combining letterpress, photopolymer etching, screen printing, chine collé and embroidery, the work draws on Victorian floriography and historical systems of looking to connect botanical classification with contemporary emotional life.

Zimu Fang

Zimu Fang's practice explores imagined landscapes shaped by migration, memory, and cultural in-betweenness. Working primarily through printmaking, she constructs places that exist beyond fixed geography, reflecting on how landscapes become emotional rather than geographical, and how belonging is something we carry with us rather than somewhere we arrive.

Jasmine Grant

GIVE ME FEVER is a sculptural work combining printmaking, archival imagery, political documentation, and botanical forms. Screen printed on wood, its abstract floral silhouettes become imposing vessels of memory, between monument, memorial, and relic.

PMC Sheila Sloss Award

Harshita Agarwal

Harshita's recent work examines the dialogue between Indian and London landscapes, tracing exchanges shaped by colonial histories and how natural and built structures negotiate and transform shared spaces.

Intaglio Printmaker Award

Haseebah Ali

The project highlights the corner shop and how it holds a place in Britain's thread work as a key part of community and civic space. Through three prints combining etching and lino print, accompanied by bespoke wallpaper, each in different locations in the UK, the series seeks to explore the familiar connections we have to the corner shop setting and how ‘bossman’ is the catalyst for this.

Travers Smith Art Programme

Laura Townsend

Symptoms of the Present develops a fictional botanical taxonomy of contemporary emotional states through two interconnected bodies of work: a herbarium series that classifies modern feelings and After Ruysch, a reimagined Dutch still life that observes them within the natural world. Combining letterpress, photopolymer etching, screen printing, chine collé and embroidery, the work draws on Victorian floriography and historical systems of looking to connect botanical classification with contemporary emotional life.

Seoin Lee

Working across printmaking and painting, Seoin’s work explores the moment just before change, when form and meaning have not yet been determined and possibilities remain open. Grounded in the distinctive texture and materiality of printmaking, her multi-perspectival landscapes traverse the boundary between abstraction and figuration, revealing a world in constant transformation and inviting open-ended interpretation.

Georgie MacLaurin

Georgie’s three prints illustrate her interest in the intersection of the Arts, in particular Tai  Chi Chuan, Meditation and Colour, with modern European generated Medicine.

Sehyun Jeon

Earthling presents fundamental and instinctive moments of human life. Everyday acts of survival, coexistence and experiences are distilled into symbolic images, inviting viewers to reflect on the shared origins and universal truths of humanity.

Yatying (Nicole) Chan

Three Missing One is an installation that explores collective cultural memory through mahjong. Through the collage of UV-prints and mahjong tiles, Nicole's work illustrates how everyday game can become sites of intergenerational connection and cultural legacy.

Zimu Fang

Zimu Fang's practice explores imagined landscapes shaped by migration, memory, and cultural in-betweenness. Working primarily through printmaking, she constructs places that exist beyond fixed geography, reflecting on how landscapes become emotional rather than geographical, and how belonging is something we carry with us rather than somewhere we arrive.

Haseebah Ali

The project highlights the corner shop and how it holds a place in Britain's thread work as a key part of community and civic space. Through three prints combining etching and lino print, accompanied by bespoke wallpaper, each in different locations in the UK, the series seeks to explore the familiar connections we have to the corner shop setting and how ‘bossman’ is the catalyst for this.

Kingston Stanley Picker Fellowship

Haseebah Ali

(see project details above)