ArtFlow Prize 2026
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and empowering platform for artists to grow, exhibit, and connect.
Main Award Winner:
Seyda Alkin
Between Threads - 2026
Oil and charcoal on canvas - 60 × 80 cm
Artwork description:
Between Threads explores the fragile relationship between individuality and collective existence through a group of intertwined human figures suspended within an undefined spatial field. The bodies appear simultaneously connected and isolated, turned inward as if absorbed in private emotional states while bound by a continuous charcoal line that moves across and between them.
The thread functions both formally and conceptually. At times hesitant and faint, at others assertive and dense, it acts as a visual trace of connection, tension, and shared psychological weight. Rather than binding the figures physically, the line suggests invisible forces; social, emotional, and relational, that shape human experience without fully determining it.
Working with a restrained palette of muted flesh tones and softened transitions, the painting balances sensitivity with control. The figures dissolve gently into one another, blurring boundaries between self and other, presence and absence. This ambiguity invites prolonged viewing, allowing meaning to emerge gradually rather than through narrative clarity.
Between Threads proposes identity as fluid and negotiated, existing in constant dialogue with external systems and collective realities. The work seeks to hold vulnerability and resilience in equilibrium, presenting connection not as resolution but as an ongoing state of tension and becoming.
Critical Reviews From
Artflow Studio, JustArt Collective,
HelloArt, 헤쳐모여, IOAEA
Seyda Alkin’s work demonstrates a restrained yet sustained tension between figuration and abstraction. The interwoven bodies form a structure that feels both enclosed and fluid, carrying psychological intensity beneath a softened palette. Through varied painterly textures, she introduces subtle conflicts that render identity as open and unresolved. The work maintains a strong balance between formal control and emotional expression, reflecting a clear contemporary sensibility.
ArtFlow Studio - Hongqian Zhang
(Curator, Director & Founder of Artflow Sudio)
There’s a beautiful softness in the tones, yet beneath that gentleness, I feel a powerful sense of shared destiny. The intertwined bodies create a quiet rhythm, as if life itself is flowing continuously between them.
HelloArt - Ying Gao, Anita
(Founder and Creative Director of HelloArt)
헤쳐모여 - Neil Wheelock Deforest Smith
(Visual Artists and Organizer of 헤쳐모여)
With her exploratory gestures, Seyda Alkin’s work stands out as someone who is pushing the boundaries of visible aesthetics. Her forms, between motion and rest, are a revival of the ambiguous and dissolve the lines between things and happenings. I hope to see her continue to push the boundaries she bounces against with her brushes.
IOAEA – Joana Alarcão
(Founder/ Editor / Creative Director of Insights of an Eco Artist)
Seyda Alkin’s Between Threads is a candid interpretation, or rather an embodiment, of our individual and collective realities. The restrained composition, in conjunction with the softness of the palette's choice and the fragile single continuous charcoal thread across the figures, speak of the constant tension or imbalance between intuitive engagement (using the inner states of the body: hesitancy, longing and restraint, as a meaning-making tool) and an intellectualized individual search for hidden connections within forms, colours, and gesture. This beautifully reveals the fluid notion of our collective identity and the external factors that shape us.
Seyda Alkin's Between Threads beautifully explores the connection between the individual and the collective, resonating deeply with JustArt's core values of human connection. The vulnerability expressed in the figures and the emotional resonance of the imagery provoke contemplation on how art can intertwine lives and foster unity. Through delicate depictions, Alkin invites viewers to reflect on the intricate threads that bind us together.
JustArt Collective -
Jenny Ping Lam Lin
(Founder of JustArt Collective)
ArtFlow Prize 2026
Seyda Alkin
Seyda Alkin is a contemporary painter born in Turkey, previously based in the Netherlands, and currently living and working in the United Kingdom. She holds a Master’s degree in Behavioural Sciences completed in the Netherlands, an academic background that continues to inform her exploration of perception, identity, and emotional experience.
Her practice investigates the tension between individuality and collective existence, often focusing on inward psychological states shaped by migration, cultural transition, and shifting environments. Rather than constructing narrative scenes, Alkin creates atmospheres of quiet suspension where figures and abstract elements coexist, reflecting moments of uncertainty, introspection, and emotional negotiation.
Working across oil, acrylic, spray paint, and charcoal, she develops restrained visual languages defined by muted palettes, softened edges, and subtle disruptions that introduce friction within otherwise calm surfaces. These material contrasts create a sense of quiet tension; a balance between control and vulnerability that runs throughout her work. Recent paintings introduce gestural charcoal lines that move across bodies and space, extending her ongoing investigation into connection, interruption, and shared emotional structures.
In 2026, she was awarded the Main Award of the ArtFlow Prize for her painting Between Threads, recognised for its conceptual depth and painterly sensitivity. Her practice continues to develop through cohesive bodies of work that balance material discipline with intuitive mark-making.
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Artflow Prize 2026
Emerging Artists
Phee Jefferies
It Crawls
Phee Jefferies
Phee Jefferies is a multidisciplinary artist and curator whose work depicts absurd interpretations of everyday situations. With a playful and irreverent approach, Jefferies alters everyday objects to challenge our expectations of what is normal. Recently she gained her Masters in Fine Art at Leeds Arts University, where her research has focused on the links between Surrealism and mental health. During this time she developed her third solo exhibition at Basement Arts, which featured artworks such as “It Crawls” and “The Ol’ Ball and Chain”. Notable group exhibitions include Ones To Watch, Brixton Art Prize and Leeds Artists Show at Leeds Art Gallery. In 2024 she took on her first curatorial role, “Please Don’t Feed The Books”, working with the Special Collections in the library at her university to curate an exhibition with the artist books.
Criticial Review by Artflow Studio
By animating the ordinary with unsettling humour, Jefferies reveals the fragile boundary between normality and absurdity, echoing Surrealism’s exploration of the subconscious. to curate an exhibition with the artist books.
Anatomy of the Unspoken Mind
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Ruby Brown
This is a series of work called 'Anatomy of the Unspoken Mind'. These drawings are made with fineliner and biro pen on stretched calico fabric. The work explores how fungi can be usued to depict inner states such as loneliness and social anxiety.
About Ruby Brown
I am Ruby Brown, a Surrey-born artist based in Cardiff, where I am completing my MFA. Blending research with surrealist experimentation, I work through drawing and multisensory practices to explore how inner emotional states can assume non-human forms.
My current work investigates fungi as a mediator for expressing emotional turbulence, using ecological systems and foraging knowledge to reimagine how the natural world can mirror and translate the complexities of human experience.
My practice examines the relationship between fungi and the human form. Through a mix of observational and surrealist drawing, I create environments where the two entwine, forming hybrid figures that are both familiar and unsettling. These imagined spaces sit between conscious thought and the underground world of fungi, where human emotion intersects with the quiet logic of fungal systems.
Using biro and fineliner, I focus on detail, contrast and intentional distortion to combine organic structures with psychological tension. Mushrooms become markers of vulnerability, decay and renewal, while mycelial threads reflect the hidden networks through which we communicate and connect.
This is a series of work called 'Anatomy of the Unspoken Mind'. These drawings are made with fineliner and biro pen on stretched calico fabric. The work explores how fungi can be usued to depict inner states such as loneliness and social anxiety.
Instagram: @ rubybrxwn
Criticial Review by Artflow Studio
Brown entwines fungi and flesh to render the unspoken mind visible, transforming loneliness and social anxiety into delicate, subterranean ecosystems of connection and decay.
Lisa Marty(LMarty)
About LMarty
My name is lisa. i am a ukrainian mixed media artist based in reading, uk. my work spans sculpture, drawing and experimental materials.
I work with sculpture and mixed media. i explore the body as an archive of memory. i focus on how war and domestic abuse shape identity. i study marks that stay on the body and how they change the way a person sees themselves.
Critical review by ArtFlow Studio
Marty reveals the body as a fragile vessel of memory, where the scars of war and domestic violence remain inscribed beneath the surface, suspended between endurance and fracture.
Ice Cream Prince -
Louise Hapton
Artwork Description
"Ice Cream Prince"
Glazed porcelain,
60x27x20cm,
2025
Critical Review by ArtFlow Studio
Through the appropriation of hyper-feminine and “cute” visual codes, Hapton turns fragility into a subversive aesthetic force, challenging the male gaze and reimagining vulnerability as power.
About Louise Hapton
Born in 2004, Louise Hapton is a French writer, ceramic sculptor and painter based in London. She graduated from the Fine Art Mixed Media (BA) degree at the University of Westminster and is curently studying at the Royal College of Art for her Ceramics and Glass MA from 2025 to 2026.
Previously, her work delved deeply into themes of mental health and her experience with schizoaffective disorder, turning the inside out. Now, she is shifting her focus toward exploring vulnerability through the interplay of cuteness and fragility. In her practice, cuteness becomes a subversive tool, transforming what is often dismissed as delicate into something defiantly strong.
Louise’s art is deeply influenced by the nostalgia of early 2000s internet culture and the unique digital landscapes that shaped Generation Z. Growing up online, she encountered a world where cute and dark imagery coexisted, from magical girl mangas to creepypastas. This “girlcore” aesthetic, blending girly-coded visuals with violence destined to a mature audience, infuses her work with both nostalgia and a need for escapism. By reclaiming and transforming these influences, she invites viewers to see vulnerability not as a weakness, but as a powerful, radical act. Tropes that originated in a sexist context, like the hyper-feminine ‘girly’ aesthetic or the pathetic aspect of the frail are her fuel to rethink and redesign society into a celebration of female and queer empowerment.
Hapton’s paintings and ceramic sculptures, cute yet unsettling, challenge the male gaze and gender based expectations while inviting a whole generation to reflect and process the content it grew up with.
Leon Hart
Plangent
Medium: Oil on canvas 100x100cm
Year: 2025
Title: Plangent
adjectiveliterary
(of a sound) loud and resonant, with a mournful tone.
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Leon Hart
I am a self taught artist predominantly creating abstract works, all pieces are deeply personal based upon the emotions and experiences relating to personal, social and cultural issues.
Abstract has always appealed to me as rather than dictating to the viewer the meaning of each piece they are able to decide for themselves what it means to them. I have always found it fascinating what others see in a piece and why take that away from them? Art is subjective and I aim to keep it that way.
Texture plays a big part in my work and on average each painting takes between three to six months to make, using only palette knives as a tool, and building up layers of oil paint, then scraping back and repeating again and again until the final highlighting stage. I seldom paint with anything other than oils and oil bars, there are three rare examples of mixed material works and even rarer works of sculpture when they are the most appropriate medium for what I want to achieve.
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Criticial Review by Artflow Studio
In Plangent, Hart builds and erodes thick strata of oil to create a resonant abstraction, where texture becomes a vessel for mournful intensity and unspoken emotional weight.
Betweenness
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Rebecca Garrard
‘Betweenness’, 2025,
acrylic ink, watercolour,
and black gesso on paper.
14.8 cm x 21.0 cm
Rebecca Garrard
Rebecca Garrard is a Manchester-based artist, curator, and director of 1838 Collective. She holds a First-Class BA in Philosophy and Italian from the University of Exeter and an MA in Painting with Distinction from Manchester School of Art.
Working primarily with ink, charcoal, and acrylic on paper, Garrard explores how drawing and painting can communicate forms of knowledge beyond language — including affective memory, somatic experience, and intergenerational traces. Her fluid, often monochrome works register movement and sensation rather than fixed image, inviting slow looking and embodied attention.
Situated within contemporary process-led practices, Garrard foregrounds intuitive and empathic ways of knowing, positioning the body as central to the transmission of memory, emotion, and lived experience.
Criticial Review by Artflow Studio
Garrard’s fluid, process-led works entwine body and landscape, positioning drawing as a somatic mode of knowing through which memory, intuition and intergenerational experience quietly surface beyond language.
Hum Tic - 2024
Daisy Ledgard
Hum Tic (2024) began as an exploration of the physical manifestation of psychological distress. It features a mouth making soundless articulations—biting, grinding, poking out its tongue—accompanied by a soundscape derived from a vocal tic: a nervous, involuntary throat clearing that is chewed up, looped, and spat out in somatised protest.
The work lingers on repetition and restraint, allowing tension to accumulate rather than resolve. Voice appears both present and obstructed, reduced to rhythm, friction, and impulse. In this way, Hum Tic reflects on constraint, resistance, and the difficulty of articulation under pressure, where the body is left to carry and express what cannot easily be spoken.
About
Daisy Ledgard
Daisy Ledgard is a sound and moving image artist based in Leeds. She collects discarded and overlooked materials, transforming fragments of everyday life into configurations that explore tension, somatic distress and the unruly body. Her work has been exhibited across the UK, including Wayzgoose (Assembly House, Leeds, 2025), Moral Panic (East Street Arts, Leeds, 2025), Contexture (The House of Smalls, Edinburgh, 2025), Unnamed Gallery (Fabrication, Leeds, 2025), Distilled (SERF Studios, Leeds, 2025), Bloom (Leeds Arts University, 2025), and Shifting Perspectives (Leeds Arts University, 2024), as well as collaborative projects such as Unknown Unknown with Parham Ghalamdar.
I work with moving image, sound, collage and assemblage to explore how bodies absorb and register the pressures of everyday life. My practice is process-driven and rooted in collecting: domestic sounds, gestures, found materials and digital fragments that are usually overlooked or discarded.
I am interested in somatic distress, tension, and the body’s refusal to behave smoothly or coherently, particularly as shaped by wider social and economic forces. Rather than presenting clear narratives or resolutions, my work lingers with repetition, misalignment and excess, allowing discomfort and ambiguity to remain.
I often deliberately misuse digital tools designed for optimisation, visibility and polish, slowing them down and working against their intended rhythms. Through this, I aim to resist clarity and productivity, and to attend instead to the emotional and material traces of lived experience, where attention, care and pressure quietly accumulate.
Criticial Review by Artflow Studio
In Hum Tic, Ledgard transforms involuntary vocal gesture into a looped, obstructed rhythm, exposing the body as a vessel of tension where articulation falters and resistance takes somatic form.
SPIRITUAL - Ana And
SPIRITUAL PHOTOGRAPHS BY MISS HOUGHTON (2024) is a diptych of graphite drawings based on photographs from Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena by Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884), a British artist associated with nineteenth-century Spiritualism.
The original publication documented séances and attempts to visually capture invisible or spectral phenomena, forming an early archive of photography’s engagement with the unseen.
Through the meticulous hand-drawing of the smallest visible unit of the photograph
— the pixel —
the work shifts mechanical reproduction into a slow, investigative act of translation. From a distance, spectral forms emerge; up close, the image dissolves into abstract marks and tonal fragments. Moving between visibility and disappearance, the drawing becomes a threshold where presence and absence coexist.
Ana And
I am a Fine Arts PhD student at Universidade de Lisboa (Lisbon, PT) and Master of Arts (Institute of Arts at UERJ, Rio, Brasil), researcher artist specialized in contemporary art and culture and artistic practice. My practice investigates the occult and invisibilities through multidisciplinary techniques of de-occultation, centered on drawing, objects, and the critical exploration of the image.
My artistic practice investigates the occult, invisibilities, enigmas, and liminal zones as aesthetic, symbolic, and epistemological fields. Through multidisciplinary techniques of de-occultation, primarily drawing, objects, and image-based inquiry. I explore fragments, vestiges, and speculative indices, fields of tension and latency, processes of revelation, concealment, and the fragile thresholds between fiction and reality, presence and absence, visibility and disappearance.
Criticial Review by Artflow Studio
By enlarging the smallest photographic unit through graphite, Ana And destabilises the mechanics of vision, constructing an unstable threshold where the spectral oscillates between presence and dissolution.
Egg-pilogue - Kavieng Cheng
"Egg-pilogue," a playful linguistic twist on the word "epilogue,", is a collection of meticulously crafted wooden egg sculptures. These unique creations, born from solid blocks of wood and adorned with UV printing, represent a harmonious blend of craftsmanship and artistic expression.
Inspired by the transformative process of eggs hatching into chicks, this sculpture serves as a morphological analogy for my self-image, inviting viewers to explore the complexities of family relationships, human connections, and the enigmatic interplay of strength and fragility, tension and harmony, energy and serenity within our world.
About Kavieng Cheng
Kavieng (Ka Wing) Cheng (b.1997, Hong Kong) graduated from Central Saint Martins and was recognised in 2025 as one of Asia’s Most Creative Women in Advertising. A multidisciplinary practitioner working across art, photography, and curatorial contexts, Cheng employs what she describes as a “shifting gaze” — moving fluidly between roles to explore the subtle textures of lived experience.
Her practice focuses on micro-psychologies and pre-linguistic territories: fleeting, often overlooked moments that reveal the fragile and complex architecture of human emotion. Through constructed imagery and spatial interventions, she creates liminal environments where perception slows and private feeling resonates within shared space.
Critical Review by ArtFlow Studio
Through a shifting, phenomenological gaze, Cheng materialises the fragile thresholds of pre-linguistic experience, transforming fleeting micro-psychologies into resonant spaces of shared vulnerability.
Host
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Amelia Frances Wood
Host was exhibited as part of a duo exhibition by Amelia Frances Wood and Bethany Stead, inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Drawing on Le Guin’s idea that early cultural tools were containers rather than weapons, the exhibition explored making as an act of care, gathering, and interconnection rather than domination.
In response, Wood reflects on cycles of decomposition and renewal observed in her worm composting system, where ants built intricate tunnels within its upper chambers. This self-sustaining, instinctual ecosystem became a site of fascination, blurring boundaries between species. Host probes the fragile intersections between autonomy and entrapment, instinct and structure, self and swarm.
About Amelia
Frances Wood
Amelia Frances Wood (b.1997, Worksop, UK) is based in Leeds, a studio holder and co-director at Assembly House. Alumni of the Yorkshire Sculpture International Network 2022, Recently completed her first Permanent Public Sculpture ‘Forged In The Muddy Beck’ Leeds, (2024). Forged In The Muddy Beck, the sculptures were nominated for the 2025 PSSA Marsh Award for excellence in public sculpture. Recent Solo exhibitions include ‘Singing Over The Bones’, OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich (2023). Duo Exhibition Sackcloth & Ashes, 36 Gallery, Newcastle (2025). Nest & Shuck, Doddington Hall Young Sculpture Award, Lincolnshire (2025).
Amelia Frances Wood explores creating in-between spaces that serve as a portal to other worlds unlike the ones we can see and touch. These worlds aim to reflect upon the liminal states of being human, what it means to exist in transition, where reality dissolves and where the physical self fades and something more primal, fluid, or otherworldly takes over. The artist chooses to work with materials that hold a weighted memory such as clay, wood, fabric, earthly material and found objects to create anthropomorphic sculptures. These sculptures reference the body, interspecies entanglement, ritual, and ecological systems. Centring ideas around the body as a vessel, delving into the holistic interplay between the external form and the internal spaces. Limbs become integral to sculptures, offering a unique perspective on the labour of our bodies and the relationship our bodies have to our environment.
Criticial Review by Artflow Studio
Wood constructs anthropomorphic, memory-laden forms that inhabit liminal ecological thresholds, where body, ritual and interspecies entanglement converge in cycles of decay, care and renewal.
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