Graduate Prizes in the School of Arts and Humanities 2023

Armourers and Brasiers Awards 2023

Elaheh Naghi Ganji

As a multidisciplinary artist, Elaheh draws inspiration from the narratives of her everyday surroundings, shaped by her lived experiences. In this collection, she explores the materiality of an eraser, using it as a means to encapsulate written words in an illegible format, expressing words she never had the courage to say aloud, and releasing the burden she carried for so long.

Find out more about Elaheh's graduate work.

Katy Gillam-Hull

Katy Gillam-Hull is a maker of objects, jewellery and walks that reflect upon found and archival materials and their capacity for encounter and for accumulating narrative through time. She pays attention to the accidental material inheritance of the world found in the waste and remnants of history and the stories they may tell.

Find out more about Katy's graduate work.

Jury Prize for Best Expanded Practice 2023

Lingjie Wang

By exploring the concept of edibility, Lingjie seeks to establish a profound connection between our innate desires and unfamiliar entities. Through deliberate manipulation of mushrooms and experimental challenges to the growing conditions of mycelium, Lingjie aims to unravel the diverse potential for relationships between humans and nature.

Find out more about Lingjie's graduate work.

Yeshe Magar

Yeshé’s work focuses on the rethinking and performativity of materials in order to communicate narratives of human existence, often collaborating with the human body to create pieces that are immersive, interactive and sensorial. Recently they have been working with living materials such as mycelium, growing structures that range from sculptural self-portraits, researching the entanglement and cyclical nature of life and death.

Find out more about Yeshé’s graduate work.

Graham Hughes Award 2023

Lili Murphy-Johnson

Lili’s practice is driven by questioning and playing with power that exists within objectification, in particular the dominance that can result from excessive submissiveness. Lili works between performance art and jewellery, poking at the meaning of being ‘correct’ in our behaviour and interactions, and uses humour and subversion to work through her ideas.

Find out more about Lili's graduate work.

Lois Lo

In a world dominated by mass production, Lois is dedicated to preserving the artistry of handmade jewellery. Each piece she creates is infused with intention, skill, and a profound appreciation for the art form. In her collection, Lois incorporates elements reminiscent of scaffolding, beams, and industrial structures to set stones at varying angles.

Find out more about Lois' graduate work.

Chadwell Award 2023

Miya Browne

Restricted to an achromatic palette BLCKGEEZER (Miya Browne) composes textured marks to build visual conversations, provoking the canvas and viewer, with ideas that already exist within the western patriarchal lens. Life and death are the inescapable echoes in the work and lived experience is both material and medium. BLCKGEEZER’s practice is an unfolding conversation with the viewer as well as with the self.

Find out more about BLCKGEEZER's graduate work.

The Hine Prize 2023

Henry Baker

Henry Baker works with painting, writing, and music. His new visual series 'Sun Paintings' represents the constant struggle to remain optimistic. The works draw upon the symbol and familiar iconography of the sun as a motif of presence and illumination, and Henry’s intention for these paintings is to be a grounding source for others. Paintings that are lived with, rather than consumed.

Find out more about Henry's graduate work.

Valerie Beston Prize 2023

Edmond Brooks-Beckman

Edmond explores what the painting says to him rather than what he’s trying to say in a type of listening which makes the painting trump narrative. Most of his thinking time is in front of the canvas, so when he faces the object he considers the marks on the surface. These forms turn into a tool to stitch fragments, they are in service of what the painting needs to resolve itself.

Find out more about Edmond's graduate work.

Metro Imaging 2023

Yiming Zu

Yiming's practice combines installation and moving images on the basis of photography. Her work stems from reality and focuses on the relationship between consciousness and human behaviour. Through fictional memory elements, subconscious metaphors and imagination to form internal and external transformations, the audience is invited into a constructed visual narrative.

Find out more about Yiming's graduate work.

Lina A.

Lina’s interdisciplinary practice consists of analogue photography, archival footage and AI-generated imagery which interrogates historical reliability. By series of alterations between the mediums Lina creates fictional narratives and personas to evoke a sense of mistrust and doubt. A fabricated archive allows Lina to draw attention to the political issues of fact manipulation and historical revisions performed by governments.

Find out more about Lina's graduate work.

SW Darkrooms 2023

Aisha Seriki

Grounded by the spirit of Sankofa, Aisha’s practice invokes the historical past as a method to understand the present realities of existence. 'Ori Inu’ (Inner Head) takes from the Yoruba Metaphysical conception “Ori’ which translates to head and refers to one's spiritual destiny. Using the Calabash as a visual metaphor, 'Ori Inu' symbolises Aisha’s attempts to mend the break between her mind and spirit and realignment of her personal destiny.

Find out more about Aisha's graduate work.

Rosie Plunkett

Rosie Plunkett's practice engages with idea’s of materiality, trace, history of place and haptic engagement in the wider theme of Landscape. Using Chalk as a primary medium, Rosie explores different way’s to represent landscapes that diverge from the traditional visual aesthetics and refocus on sensory and haptic ways in which to interact with a Landscape. This approach of knowing through the hands allows for a deeper analysis into substance and the politics of Land.

Find out more about Rosie's graduate work.

Labyrinth Lab 2023

Hilary Kennedy

Hilary's work explores the significance of Irish and British folk rituals and their interconnection with people and nature in our modern landscape. Using delicate materials like straw and wild grass, the work intricately weaves together different structures and forms using practices inspired by ancient Celtic techniques. The fragile and ephemeral nature of these materials serves as an allegory for the waning relevance of age-old rituals in our modern era.

Find out more about Hilary's graduate work.

Artful Dodgers Imaging 2023

Natalia Krezel

In her images, Natalia tries to find a fine balance between the intimacy of a snapshot and the dignified, staged formality of portrait painting. She creates images that are reliant on emotion and narrative. In "Fairy Hills" she explores the desire to disappear and the human fascination with running away from the world.

Find out more about Natalia's graduate work.

Shadow Lab

Rachel Gordon

Merging both autobiographical and fictional narratives, Rachel is intrigued by the cognitive interplay between materiality and imagination. Shes navigates the visualisation of thoughts and experiences, contemplating the ways in which the personal and collective, whether in figurative or abstract form, become manifested or obscured within imagery.

Find out more about Rachel's graduate work.

Xi Lin

Through her photography, Xi Lin explores the theme of female and marginalised groups such as sexual minorities. 'The Dream of Daxi' is composed of experimental moving image and a series of photographic installations, narrated in the form of a pseudo-documentary. The film focuses on Daxi, a transgender woman from northern China, and critically reflects on the societal conditions and survival status of transgender individuals as marginalized groups in Chinese society.

Find out more about Xi's graduate work.

Wenzheng Xia

Wenzheng sees photography as a way to capture reality, through a focus on the everyday, an abstraction of the metaphor of the figurative, and the flow of time in the analogue and darkroom. He uses poetic image language to peel off the gap between reality and fiction, reflecting on the relationship between people and space, and discovering the intense hidden under the calm reality.

Find out more about Wenzheng's graduate work.

New Photography Prize 2023

Andras Ladocsi

András Ladocsi uses an alternative approach to documentary photography to show his truth to the public. Often the images he produces are halfway between realism and surrealism.

'There is a big river, in which there is a big island, in which there is a lake, in which there is an island, in which there is a small house, where a life is growing in a womb.'

Find out more about András' graduate work.

Aisha Seriki

Please find info above, as well as the New Photography Prize Aisha also achieved the SW Darkrooms 2023 award.

Julian Konuk

Julian is a multidisciplinary filmmaker and experimental writer based in London. His work has been shown at the Barbican, Fringe! Queer Film Fest, Tate Modern as part of Offprint Projects, Vogue Fabrics Dalston as part of Otherness Archive, Camp Trans, Bermondsey Project Space, L’OEIL Club in Paris, The Cactus Club Milwaukee, Camberwell College of Arts, Southwark Park Galleries, Royal College of Art, VSSL studio as part of Live Art Club, and at Queer Circle with Queer Youth Art Collective.

Find out more about Julians' graduate work.

Qiuyu Wu

Qiuyu Wu attempts to express the emotions and experiences related to her past through her visual creations, she delves into themes of love, loss, freedom, and independence. Her works aim to provoke contemplation on gender, identity, and societal expectations, urging viewers to reassess and reshape their understanding of the female emotional experience.

Find out more about Qiuyu's graduate work.

Rían Mcconnell

Rían used the photographic process to document their journey grappling with both their identity as a trans person and mental health. Finding human anatomy in structural forms and looking inward, moving to self-portraiture and the symbolic use of physical and omnipresent constraints, Rían has written and continues to write a narrative on their own lived experience in their body and society through their work.

Find out more about Rian's graduate work.

Yuyue Zhu

Dian Cheng utilizes photography as her primary medium to delve into the intricate psychological framework of images, which wield substantial influence over ideological domination and control of individuals. Dian Cheng also explores the pivotal role images play in shaping both personal and societal identities, and their far-reaching impact on our core concepts, values, and thought processes.

Find out more about Yuyue's graduate work.

Gilbert Bayes Awards 2023

Candice Dehnavi

Candice's practice is an act of cohesive world building. It often assumes a childlike demeanour, using comedy and play to hide deeper issues: intersectional identity politics, cultural estrangement, gender identity and the reflective doubt of self-image. Her work samples disparate elements from a personal history of detachment, and through the lens of absurdity, presents a comically exaggerated visual space into which one can insert their own narrative meaning.

Find out more about Candice's graduate work.

Adriana Wynne

Through her practice, Adriana aims to surpass the boundaries and limitations imposed by societal beliefs regarding what constitutes a body as a means of confronting or embracing her own feelings of alienation or detachment from physicality. By using visual language that reflects the layered and multifaceted nature of the body, Adriana challenges viewers to think more deeply about their own relationships to their physical selves.

Find out more about Adriana's graduate work.