Graduate Prizes in the School of Arts and Humanities

Royal Over-Seas League Award

Sogon Kim

Sogon's work explores geoscience and elements of space, such as celestial bodies, the aurora borealis and the topography of the earth, through glass work. By exploring the phenomena of material, Sogon allows the material itself to create its own narrative which opens up diverse interpretations from viewers.

Find out more about Sogon's graduate project.

Critics Circle Prize

Elizabeth Degenszejn

Originally from Brazil, Elizabeth specialises in hand building and slip casting. Her subtle minimalist sculptures express a personal story with feelings and emotions formed in childhood. Currently working with porcelain and Parian clay, for their elegance, purity of colour and natural sheen, she is committed to the quality of the finish, which can be seen through the smoothness of the surfaces she makes.

Find out more about Elizabeth's graduate project.

R.J Washington Bursary Award

Zoe Weisselberg

Zoe's clay sculpted works are metaphors for our complexity, both mentally and physically, reflecting moments of instability, but also the beauty in our fallibilities. Her intention is to convey wonder, suggesting both a contemplative stillness and a vibrant anarchy. Through her work with clay she seeks to take risks to explore its capacities and limits and, in turn, her own.

Find out more about Zoe's graduate project.

RCA/CAP and Chelsea + Westminster NHS Trust CW+ Relax Digital Commission

Julie Dusuel

Julie Dusuel is a French artist whose work engages with erotism and desire, social justice and ecology, from an intersectional and queer feminist perspective. Using writing, moving-image, extended reality, sculpture, and sonic materials they imagine ways to step away from the dominant gaze and the anthropocentric experience, breaking through different layers of reality.

Find out more about Julie's graduate project.

loretta london

Loretta is a London born artist who describes herself as a mother, feminist, artist, actress, comedienne, writer, ceramic expert and poet. Her graduate work moves between sculpture, performance, photography and ceramics, exploring personal identity with both humour and sincerity.

Find out more about loretta's graduate project.

Lianhua Zhang

Lianhua Zhang is an artist from China whose work focuses on memory, identity and experiences through photography, moving images and documentaries, which explore the tragedies and absurdities of contemporary society. Through the arrangement and rearrangement of objects Lianhua explores the absence of experience, the dislocation of discourse and the blurring of their own positioning.

Find out more about Lianhu's graduate project.

Graham Hughes Award

Zofia Skoroszewska

Zofia is a Polish-born artist whose work explores the space where technology becomes magical to most of us, offering us a play of the constantly shifting perceptions and deceptions we learn to grapple with as we navigate through life today. Her objects are anchored in a vague historical context, addressing a pre-empirical understanding of matter by tackling the inaccessibility of the in-between.

Find out more about Zofia's graduate project.

Kexin Liu

During her time at the RCA Kexin has worked with houseplants, AI algorithms, and the bacteria living in her body, pushing what our understanding of an art practice situated within a Jewellery and Metal programme can be. For her graduate project Kexin has produced a record split into four tracks, each corresponding to a different site on her body where bacteria was sampled.

Find out more about Kexin's graduate project.

Armourers and Brasiers Award

Hannah Rhian Davies

Hannah is a jeweller who juxtaposes the futuristic with the traditional to support narratives surrounding the way identity is interwoven through the materials of the landscape and the self, specifically the landscape surrounding the farm in Wales where she grew up. Hannah views jewellery as an extension of the mind and body, objects projected onto a body as part of a two-way relationship.

Find out more about Hannah's graduate project.

Valerie Beston Prize

Emma Prempeh

Emma is a British artist with Ghanaian and Vincentian heritage whose graduate paintings depict familiar aspects of her Caribbean domestic life through a focus on interiors and moods. The paintings are expanded through physical elements within the space intertwining with viewers as the partially defined figures and objects float freely through the space they inhabit.

Find out more about Emma's graduate project.

Hine Prize

Albano Hernandez

Albano is a Spanish artist who works with the aesthetics that meat generates as a commodity, based on his experience growing up in the Ávila region of Spain where meat consumption is a great part of the culture. With a special emphasis on processed meat and the simulacrum of fake meat, Albano focuses on how commodification modifies the perception of matter.

Find out more about Albano's graduate project.

Travers Smith Award

Joseph Aina
Anna Blom

Joseph Aina is a Nigerian-British Artist living and working in both London and Windsor. His paintings offer a commentary on the ills of popular culture and ideas of race. Joseph's paintings often visually reference prominent black artists, and feature freehand drawing with chalks and oil pastel that treat the canvas like a sketchbook, producing work that remains honest, direct, and personal.

Joseph was also shortlisted for the Valerie Beston Prize.

Find out more about Joseph's graduate project.

Anna Blom is a Swedish born artist who works in an interdisciplinary manner combining painting, drawing, sound, words and found objects in arrangements of a continuous narrative in a diaristic archival methodology. By studying the nuances of isolated mundane moments she discovers the overlooked emotions and unseen objects that occupy our meticulously assembled environment.

Find out more about Anna's graduate project.

Metro Imaging Mentorship Award

Katrine Hoff

Katrine is a Danish multidisciplinary artist engaged with concepts of deconstruction, repair through experimentation with textiles. Their graduate project, 'The Hungry Eye (a deconstruction)', questions the ways in which we experience and engage with the constant flow of images existing within today’s society using imagery sourced from both personal and found archives to depict both the human and the non-human.

Find out more about Katrine's graduate project.

Ariel Hacohen

Ariel Hacohen is a visual artist from Jerusalem who experiments with a variety of photographic approaches. Inspired by imagery of Jewish fencing clubs in early 20th century Europe, 'The Jewish Fencing Club' re-enacts and appropriates elements from these clubs, intertwining racial anthropology, impotent masculinity, Jewish-nationalism, homoeroticism, and the graceful sport of fencing.

Find out more about Ariel's graduate project.

Artful Dodger Lab Award

Fernanda Liberti

Fernanda Liberti is a Brazilian artist working with photography and video. Their graduate photo series is about the Tupinambá cape, a feather ornament that was made and used by native Brazilians until the 15th century. Their images resulted from encounters and collaboration with indigenous artist, Glicéria Tupinambá and one of the last Tupinambá communities in Brazil.

Find out more about Fernanda's graduate project.

Lucas Bullens

Lucas Bullens is a Swiss born artist and designer specialising in photography. Interested in ideas of the 'soul’ and transmigration, Lucas’ practice revolves around exploring the transcendental. Using the camera as an instrument, he seeks to extract the immaterial buried within the material, inspired by the natural world and the boundlessness of the universe.

Find out more about Lucas' graduate project.

Labyrinth Lab Mentorship Award

Isabelle Young

Isabelle's graduate project, The Sea Rising, explores the ongoing endeavour to shape, control and preserve the Venetian Lagoon, Italy. Their work focuses on details which say much more than wide shots, not speaking of the whole but bowing down before quieter moments. These photographs, akin to the narrator, may appear to be all knowing but they are evidently not all telling.

Find out more about Isabelle's graduate project.

Guanling Chen

Originally from China, Guanling photographs landscape, portrait and still life in an attempt to trace humanity's lost paradise and explore the romantic and fickle relationship between people, space, and herself. By focusing her gaze on people, objects and landscapes she captures traces of life. Her graduate project combines two photo series which explore loss and connection.

Find out more about Guanling's graduate project.

Shadow Labs Mentorship Award

Julia Albrecht

German artist Julia Albrecht examines the link between sociological and gender-scientific research, intensively preoccupied with personal experiences. Through the camera, she vividly tries to reach the mind and explore the depths of life and its emotions. Her focus points oscillate between pain and joy, letting life in and having it taken away again.

Find out more about Julia's graduate project.

Thomas Jenkins

Thomas is a visual artist working with photographic processes, exploring colour and abstraction to question what is defined as a photograph in the modern day. His processes aim to create discord within the traditional photographic processes, taking inspiration from previous artistic movements and most importantly jazz, to create a method of spontaneity directly related to the materials which result in unpredictable images that are dislocated from the tangible world.

Find out more about Thomas' graduate project.

SW Darkroom Residencies and Mentorship Award

Alice Oliver

Alice is a research-driven visual artist and writer whose practice focuses on our relationships to our surrounding natural landscape, and within a contemporary feminist discourse, provides a retelling of the deeply intimate connections between human and non-human nature. In an ongoing lyrical exploration into the relationship between ancient landscapes and photography's materiality, Alice unveils the natural cycles and suppressed narratives by visualising the rituals of the female body.

Find out more about Alice's graduate project.

Jakob Storm

Inspired by childhood memories of exploring Jutland in Denmark as a boy, Jokob questions landscapes through etching and photography. How does the meaning of nature unfold today? Is it fenced-up private gardens in central London? A forest designed for easy hunting and fast production of wood? For animals? Jakob explores these ever-changing, ever old, ever new questions through his practice.

Find out more about Jakob's graduate project.

New Photography Prize

Zhiyun Lei

Chinese born Zhiyun focuses on the current status of art in society from the perspective of post-conceptual art. Their graduate project deconstructs visual ideology, using Photoshop to erase all the figures in a reproduction of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco and replacing them with nude images of the artist, replicating every posture of the figures in the original painting.

Find out more about Zhiyun's graduate project.

Hsueh-Hung Cheng

Hsueh-Hung is a visual artist from Taipei exploring the notion of the container. With a particular interest in photographic representation and its limitations, he utilizes various image-making processes and modes of presentation, from traditional to specialised industrial methods, as a critical response. Through the process of image-making, the context embedded within the subjects are brought back to the surface of appearance.

Find out more about Hsueh-Hung's graduate project.

Francesca Hummler

Francesca is a German-American visual artist working with photography and video. Interested in identity, she draws from her experience as the daughter of German immigrants in the United States to explore familial intimacy and generational trauma. Heavily influenced by the concept of photo-therapy, Francesca often utilizes self-portraiture to untangle her sense of self.

Find out more about Francesca's graduate project.

Ellen Yi Wang (An Su)

An Su is a visual artist mainly working with photography, film and text. Born in a small town surrounded by mountains in southwest China, her work explores a transcendental perception of nature with mysterious imagination, constantly dissolved in her works. Her research explores nature, feminism, postmemory and disease, using specific events and sensitive emotions to start collective narration and historical reflection.

Find out more about An Su's graduate project.

Ou Lin

Ou Lin is a Chinese visual artist who works primarily in photography and performance. Her present work offers a feminist perspective of the gestating body from material and psychological angles. It presents a radical rethinking of the stereotypical versions of the happy, suffering and idealised pregnant woman as represented in art history and contemporary culture.

Find out more about Ou Lin's graduate project.

Travers Smith Award

Elissa Jane Diver

London born Elissa's practice involves the creation of a framework or space in which to make work, with the knowledge that there will be both planned and unplanned outcomes. Her graduate work uses the studio as a metaphor within a project which responds to a rewilding site in West Sussex. By bringing found objects from the site into the studio Elissa kick started the process by generating interventions.

Find out more about Elissa's graduate project.

Sarabeth Domal

Sarabeth is an American artist concerned with reconstructed landscapes, and the capacity of photographic mediums to represent collective memory and temporality within the land. Through layers of interdisciplinary research, varied lens-based approaches, and auto-ethnographic writing, Sarabeth abstracts the familiar visual classification of landscapes, and contextualises landscape photography within current ecological realities. 

Find out more about Sarabeth's graduate project.

Intaglio Printmaker Award

Emilie Meyn

Emile is a Danish artist primarily working with painterly monoprints. She works with ideas of the feminine body and its relationship to identity, sexuality, loss and shame. The work is largely autobiographical with figures all representative of Emile and her experiences living in a feminine body using image-making as an extension of herself, creating painterly monoprints from and of her body.  

Find out more about Emile's graduate project.

Travers Smith Award

Harry Ross-Masson

Harry's practice explores ecologies, with a focus on the relationship between an organic and fabricated reality, examining how our connection to the natural world is obscured by the objects, tools, technologies, and stuff we create. His graduate project, 'The Great Divide' is an installation which surrounds the observer in an excess of images and objects that question the materiality of our everyday environments.

Find out more about Harry's graduate project.

Olivia Wells

Olivia's practice explores gesture, touch and the photographic image, considering ideas around our learnt and primal behaviours and our engagement with our digital and natural environments. In her series of silkscreen drawings she pushes graphite through exposed silk screens of photographs of nature, creating loose, gestural marks in a relatively blind process.

Find out more about Olivia's graduate project.

Saruha Kilaru

Saruha's practice is driven by a high sensitivity to colour and its ever-influencing presence in our environment. She explores this through the meditative processes of repetitive mark making and print making. Her recent works combine the elements of colour and repetition with ideas around touch and perception integrated through play.

Find out more about Saruha's graduate project.

Katrine Lyck

Katrine is a Danish artist exploring how a heightened awareness of nature has a nurturing impact on body and mind. The work is influenced by the collective experience of lockdown and a personal experience of chronic pain, conveying a sense of rest and wellbeing by bringing together soft natural silks and the monoprinted shadows of plants on skin. 

Find out more about Katrine's graduate project.

Printmakers Council Prize

Francesca Onesti

Francesca's practice revolves around embodied experiences of remote natural environments and phenomena, investigating her relationship with locations, particularly volcanic environments in Iceland. Her recent works were developed from a solo camping expedition to the volcanic eruption at Fagradalsfjall and the Krafla volcanic zone.

Find out more about Francesca's graduate project.