Open Call Winners 2026

Eva Sajovic a Slovene artist working across live art, installation, and social practice, with a focus on material and social transformation. Her work is influenced by my personal experience of Yugoslavia’s disintegration during her teenage years, followed by the fast transition from a socialist to a capitalist state. This formative experience drives her efforts to understand and navigate the neoliberal world she inhabits.

Georgie Huxley is a British painter living and working in London. Working primarily in oil on linen, she is drawn to the emotional charge within everyday moments. Through layered mark-making and tonal subtlety, she builds images that dwell in liminal spaces, where presence and absence blur. 

Ian Gichohi is a photographer living and working in Nairobi, Kenya. Taking place as a central theme, Gichohi’s compositions highlight the ways in which objects around us offer insight into the ways we live. His image-making is an exploration of our relationships with our environment, and the function of everyday objects as vessels for subjective meaning. Gichohi creates images across the genres of still-life, landscape, and portrait photography.

Reality is not fixed. Ita Maude Wooller’s practice begins with the proposition that each of us constructs reality every day, through a continual negotiation between interior experience and the external & emotional architecture upon which we hang our lives. Working across painting, sculpture and installation, she creates visual essays that examine the deeply human impulse to establish order, control and safety within an inherently unstable world.

Josie Mond-James is a weaver and natural dyer, formally trained in woven textiles at the Royal College of Art. After graduating in 2013, she worked within design before stepping away from weaving while raising her family. Returning to the loom several years later felt like finding her way back to a language she already knew, while also reclaiming a creative space for herself. The time at the loom has become both a sanctuary and a place for renewed experimentation.

For Kelly, making art is the practice and unfolding of empathy. A kind of prayer for humanity. A way to give form to something that I do not understand. It momentarily makes some sort of sense of the mystery and stalls it in time to further contemplate.

Painting is an act of love and faith. Painting is a kind of prayer and protest that says, I am here and remain hopeful while hate seems to prevail. She uses form to sum up reoccurring feelings from my personal history as well as the desire to connect with something beyond what she can comprehend in hopes the paintings create a space for reflection of a shared human experience.

Based in the UK, Mona Sultan is a visual artist whose practice explores the tension between what is visible and what remains unknowable. Her visual language emerges from a diverse background in graphic design, film, and fashion, bringing a distinctive compositional and conceptual sensibility to her work.

Using found photographs, collage, and mixed media, Sultan investigates how memory is shaped as much by absence as by presence, challenging both the meaning of the photograph and its capacity to represent. Central to her practice is the act of disruption: collage fractures the image, paint interrupts its narrative, and the resulting “visual glitches” unsettle its authority, creating spaces where images hover between coherence and dissolution.

Nikki Heaton is an artist working in sculptural textiles. After qualifying in Product Design, she specialised in Colour and Material Design — drawn instinctively to the elements that give objects their emotional resonance. For 25 years she developed that expertise with major luxury brands, including 15 years consulting in-house on exterior colour and material design for Nokia, Microsoft, Jaguar Land Rover and McLaren.

Her practice is rooted in colour and material as carriers of emotional resonance — work that gives form to what often goes unspoken.

Sophia Rosenthal is a London-based painter working from physical photographs, painting fragments of the everyday: moments caught between gesture, atmosphere and recollection. Born in Seoul, raised in the Philippines, and now based in the UK, her practice is shaped by the experience of living between cultures, places and versions of home. Painting, with its inherent slippages, mirrors the instability of memory and time. Its physical qualities - transparency, texture, erasure, immediacy - allow me to explore the lived experience of migration and the diasporic body.