Don’t miss these Emerging Art Prize nominees!

Introducing some of the new nominees for our Emerging Art Prize: Sophie Lloyd, Aurelie Meriel, Michael Bebb and Gregory Simpson.

Sophie Lloyd
Sophie Lloyd is a final year student on her BA at City and Guilds London. Her primary medium is sugar sculpture held together by lead came. Her works resemble stained glass windows but are small and whimsical in subject, such as her piece ‘Big Baby Birds’. Lloyd uses sugar to explore consumerism and our collective instinctive hunger for more.

Aurelie Meriel
Aurelie Meriel is a multi-disciplinary artist who explores gender politics, femininity and female representation in her work. As well as using abstraction in her pieces, seen in her work ‘3 Women’, Meriel also employs textiles to exemplify this gendered form of making and make powerful feminist statements in a medium usually associated with domicile and docile women.

Michael Bebb
Michael Bebb creates large abstract paintings using repeating linear patterns in bright, entrancing colours. Bebb wants to challenge the misery in the world with his work and does so effectively as the canvases before us are both pleasing to the eye and soul. He uses colour and form intuitively, such as in his work ‘On Sunset’, to represent the unboundedness of nature and the world around us, as well as his own inner world.

Gregory Simpson
Gregory Simpson is in his final year at Birmingham City University studying Fine Art. He is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses Found Objects and abstraction. His work is playful in form, but deeply reflective of current issues such as the energy and cost of living crisis and the history of the city of Birmingham, his hometown. The elements of the work seem precariously balanced, exemplified in his sculpture ‘Let the Funk Ride’, but have been carefully constructed through a laborious making process, bringing a new life to discarded objects.

Special mention to our previously highlighted nominee Sean Davidson, as he has now been selected for the Freeland Painting Prize 2023.

These are just a few examples of the exciting new emerging art nominees we have to highlight - keep an eye on this section as new artists and artworks are arriving every day.