NEW GRADUATE AWARDS 2026
“It is with great pleasure that we announce this years recipients of the SSA New Graduate Award. This year, the council have been scouring the country’s degree shows in search of graduates whose work embodies both the spirit of Scottish Contemporary Art and the aims of the SSA.
The winners of the SSA New Graduate Award will be given the opportunity to showcase their work in our Annual Exhibition at the start of 2027 as well as two year’s free Graduate membership to the society; all this to ensure they are well on their journey of becoming Scotland’s next generation of contemporary artists.”
– Frank To, SSA Co-President.
The selected pieces will be on display at the SSA 128th Annual Exhibition which will be held at The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh in early 2027.
AMY BLACKBOURNE
GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART
There is a curious space between earth and spiritual realm, between the seen world and the unseen world. Blackbourne works across mediums that float between 2D and 3D, to allude to this further dimension. Based in Glasgow, from Northern Ireland. Thus, her practice is positioned between city, sea and open country, with her sketches and writings of these spaces forming visual framework to experiment over. Through a variety of methods, Amy leans into the ambiguity of familiar city and landscapes shapes as subject. Amalgamating their motifs, such as houses, motorways and trees, with automatic mark-making and text, she depicts the invisible realm, creating spaces that feel both familiar and vastly unknown. The use of cadmium red monoprint provides continuity across these worlds and the chaos is contained often by boundaries of hand-crafted wooden structures. Blackbourne employs physical metaphors in her practice, inviting a viewer into these paces and places with light humour and cultural references. Through references to space, chess or telegraph poles intertwined in the work, she conveys large, conceptual ideas in simpler terms, to lure the viewer into a deeper curiosity of the unseen spiritual activity and personal dynamics in the spaces around them.
Image: Waiting, on Water and the Sun on Earth, Oil and acrylic paint and pastel, monoprint and pencil on canvas, 2026
RUMENG CHEN
EDINBURGH COLLEGE OF ART
Exploring how artworks become generative through viewing, Chen understands generativity as a condition in which perception remains unstable and is continuously reshaped by the act of looking, preventing fixed interpretation. Departing from systems-based definitions of generative art, he draws on “fictioning” to introduce subtle disruptions that unsettle familiar structures and reorient perception.
In recent works, reduced imagery and simplified human-like figures shift attention from identification to relational reading, focusing on rhythm, density, and distribution. In installation settings, spatial elements such as slopes, partitions, and light guide movement without determining meaning. Generativity emerges through this ongoing process of movement and re-seeing, where interpretation is continuously reconfigured through the viewer’s experience.
Image: 《像人》· Almost Human, Plywood, LED fiber optic lighting, fiber optic cables, ceramic, RGB stage lighting, 2026
DAISY CLARK
UNIVERSITY OF HIGHLANDS & ISLANDS, SHETLAND
Clark’s multidisciplinary practice is grounded in painting and is focused on portraiture. Using acrylic paints, charcoal, lino print, oil sticks, coloured pencils and embroidery, she combines representational painting with abstract forms, drawn and embroidered marks, and sculptural figurines.
Clark’s practice is led by a gradual process of mark-making and experimentation, together with representational studies. Building up an accumulation of layers, sometimes focusing on a specific area, until the subject’s unique identity emerges. This process allows her to experiment with different modes of expression and emotion. Exploring how the different identities of loved ones and their self manifest through faces, with a particular focus on the eyes, alongside three-dimensional figures and graphic motifs that reflect on themes of flesh, mortality and the body.
Image: Always There, Acrylic paint, Lino print, coloured pencils, fabric, graphite pencil, 2026
DAVID CROCKERY
GRAYS SCHOOL OF ART, ABERDEEN
Clay and gypsum are formed from elements of the earth. Both are plied with water, exposed to air and baptised in the flames of a kiln. They are then reborn into our world to become commonly used materials. This is one of the primal forms of control that has led the human mind to Impose itself upon our environment.
In the making of a plaster mould an embodiment of replication is created. Their presence becomes unique in the absence of their original purpose.
The utilitarian form is manipulated into sculpture through an amalgam of observation, instinct and craft.
Image: Dormant Mould Assemblage, Plaster and Ceramic, 2026
CONNOR DRAYCOTT
GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART
Draycott is a multidisciplinary artist examining the relationship between artefact and artifice, crafting scenes that mix true history and folklore through a postmodernist lens.
Painting on aluminium, he uses this flat and clinical surface to grow an epidermis of layered wax and oil paint. The paintings undergo stages of reversal and revival as the layers are worn and eaten away with sandpaper, turpentine, and sometimes chisels. Painting back into them again, this process becomes cyclical. The overlapping of construction and destruction gives the paintings a sense of a life lived, as they embody an old tool of understanding.
His sculptural work continues down this path of speculative world-building, as the prop-like design and nature of these sculptures blur the line between what is physically true and what is false/simulated. The artifice pretends to be an artefact until it is accepted by others as a real object of meaning itself. He asks, when does the object metamorphose, and why?
Through enactment, Draycott pushes out all prior understanding to allow him to play out scenarios from deep within his thoughts, like unavoidable daydreams. A character isn’t portrayed, but a picking of my own observations and anxieties is forefronted when researching and making.
Image: Falkirk Triangle, Laser print of photocopier paper mounted on plywood, 2026
EMMA EUNSON
MORAY SCHOOL OF ART (UHI)
Eunson explores personal narratives and the emotional weight carried within domestic spaces and the objects that we surround ourselves with. In spending time with these quiet things, she begins to discover the stories they have to tell, having a conversation with the objects and questioning the value and place they hold within our lives. The things we live alongside quietly absorb and retain traces of us, holding memories that shift, fade, and resurface over time.
Eunson spends time working with fragments of memory through layering, repetition, hidden imagery, shifting perspectives, and reflection. Understanding memory as something unstable and continually changing, forgotten experiences resurfacing while others fade. Using cyanotype across analogue and digital processes, she works through layering to reflect this. The medium allowing images to emerge, be altered, erased, or fade into shadow, reflecting her experience of holding onto something both present and unreachable.
As Remo Bodei writes, ‘Things are not just things. They bear human traces, they prolong the memory of people for us.’ Even silent, ordinary objects can hold emotional significance if we choose to notice them.
Bodei, R. (2015) The Life of Things, The Love of Things. Translated by M. Baca. New York: Fordham University Press.
Image: What we place before ourselves. What is revealed through the objects we choose to live beside? What do they tell us, and can this reflection ever fully be seen at once?, Cyanotype on glass, wood, 2026
LAUREN EVANS
DUNCAN OF JORDANSTONE COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN, DUNDEE
Evans is a contemporary artist who uses themes such as feminism, motherhood and politics in her works, heavily inspired by current world events and pop culture. She considers herself a mixed media artist, in which her primary medium is collage however she also has an interest in print, found objects and installations. Lauren is drawn to physical mediums, things that she can craft with and build upon in layers.
The Daily Males Newsagents (2026) is an installation that reflects upon the epidemic of violence by men against women and children in the UK.
The objective of this work is to present the reality and scale of misogyny, sexism, and violence that women endure, as well as to challenge the narrative of those protesting for immigrants and refugees to be deported to “keep women and children safe” in the UK. Steeped in symbolism, satire, and hidden messages, the many elements of this installation are carefully considered to draw in the viewer and reflect on the saddening facts that were thoroughly researched by the artist throughout the process.
Image: The Daily Males, Collage, cardboard, screenprint, RISO print, paper, cork, wood, pins, 2026
KAYANA LAMONT
GRAYS SCHOOL OF ART, ABERDEEN
Lamont’s practice focuses on birds from art history, while embracing their delicacy and unfortunate demise.
These works have been reimagined through shifting their context and surfaces.
By removing this recreation of “The Hunt: The Common Pheasant” by Edouard Traviés from its previous context Lamont aims to illustrate how environments shape the outcome of a painting.
The hanging pheasant was painted directly onto their studio wall, allowing the suspended bird to become part of the architecture and to breathe throughout the space without confinement, as it would exist in nature, this created a connection between the artwork and its environment.
The screw holes left behind following the wall’s removal, mimic bullet holes, highlighting the manner in which these game birds are commonly lost.
The connection between birds and industrialisation has been explored within Lamont’s practice, the small sparrow is painted to blend with its metal background, alluding to mankind’s disregard for animals due to continuous manufacturing which often impacts wildlife.
Lamont’s compassion for animals urged them to confront their sensitivities through the form of oil paint. This exposure to animal loss through creation has positively altered their perception of death.
Image: Doubling, After Edouard Traviés, Oil paint on wall, 2026
LILY LEAVER
EDINBURGH COLLEGE OF ART
Lily Leaver is a London-based intaglio printmaker. Her recent body of work, Constructing the Anti-Sublime, is a collection of prints which examine extraction, overconsumption, and the political fictions which sustain them. These environments operate as speculative sites – ruinous, post-industrial and atemporal – where human ambition is rendered unstable.
A developed visual language of motifs articulates this aesthetic, resisting resolution and favoring tension and absence. Drawing on architectural forms and extractive processes, these scenes situate the ecological crisis within broader economic and cultural frameworks of the Anthropocene.
Printmaking and sculpture meld, immersing the viewer in geometric environments, confronting them with an unsettling awareness of their own position within systems of extraction and control.
Image: 6 Voids, Zinc plate etchings on Hahnemühle paper, 2026
MYA WILSON
DUNCAN OF JORDANSTONE COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN, DUNDEE
Wilson’s practice operates across painting, projection mapping and sound, exploring how perception shifts through light, space and movement. Working with geometry, projected light and immersive audio, she creates environments that transform in response to the viewer’s position and movement through space.
While many works begin with flat surfaces, they extend beyond the static image. Through repetition, rhythm and spatial intervention, she constructs visual experiences that continuously realign, distort and fragment depending on how they are encountered.
Influenced by brutalist architecture, Op Art and electronic music culture, they are interested in the relationship between sound, atmosphere and perception. Light and audio function not as supporting elements, but as structural materials that shape the sensory experience of the work.
Movement is central to Wilson’s approach. As audiences navigate the space, forms shift and visual relationships evolve, revealing perception as something unstable, participatory and constantly in flux.
Recent installations bring these ideas together through responsive spatial environments where projection, surface and sound interact in real time. The work invites viewers into an active encounter with space, asking them to become aware of perception itself as a dynamic and shifting process.