The SCAF Emerging Artist Award has been created to acknowledge up and coming artists of all ages who are living in the Yorkshire region. The intent of the award is to bring recognition and awareness to outstanding visual artists in the region who are at the early stages of their career or who have not yet established a reputation as an artist amongst art curators, buyers and critics.
/ This years subject:
As you are reading the words that make up this paragraph, you are generously donating some of your time to SCAF. Time has a value to us, it is limited, it passes, and we can never regain the time that we have spent. We measure the passing of time, keeping diaries, celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, marking the changes of the seasons and the phases of the moon. Many of us run our lives constantly watching the clock, filling our calendars with time critical appointments and events planned for the future, fearing being late or feeling within us that we never have enough time.
Everything in the earthly physical realm is subject to change with the passage of time including the planet we inhabit, which had a beginning and will eventually die over a time course that is vastly different from that of a human life or a snowflake. Art has the power to transcend time. Artists throughout history have captured fleeting moments in time, represented events, people, places, and the nature of time itself in a myriad of different media and representative forms. What does TIME mean to you as an artist? How would you choose to represent this subject in your own piece of art? The subject is yours to ponder and interpret in your own unique way.
/ THE FINALISTS
Archie Brooks
Archie Brooks is a Leeds-based artist whose work explores the intersection of organic materials and kinetic motion. Using wood and mechanized movement, his sculptures challenge perceptions of rhythm, repetition, and human connection to natural cycles. His works react to audience presence, incorporating live video feeds and motion-sensing elements to explore themes of surveillance, visibility, and self-awareness. Often shifting between revealing and concealing the viewer, his sculptures create a dynamic interplay between control and chance. By merging traditional materials with movement, Brooks highlights the tension between organic life and mechanized systems, offering a thought-provoking meditation on impermanence, futility, and the rhythms that define human existence and the environment we inhabit.
Daisy Age Art
Daisy Age Art is the work of Emma, a mixed-media artist and counsellor based in York. Having studied set, prop, and costume design, Emma has spent over a decade leading creative workshops for adults with learning difficulties and mental health challenges; supporting other creatives to showcase their work. In 2024, Emma transitioned to self-employment to focus on her own artistic voice after years of helping others find theirs.
Emma’s work weaves her experience of storytelling, psychology, and creativity, crafting nostalgic, textured pieces that invite connection and reflection. Inspired by dioramas and the "Daisy Age" ethos, she blends vintage imagery, layered textures, and personal storytelling to evoke familiarity and discovery, drawing viewers into miniature worlds filled with warmth, whimsy, and meaning.
Ian Hinley
Ian is an artist from North Yorkshire. He’s been painting in oils for over 20 years and he gave up his career in illustration to focus on his personal work full time 5 years ago. 2024 was a breakthrough year for Ian, when his monumental painting “Morpheus Among the Dreams” was displayed at Humber Street Gallery in Hull, the city where he now lives and works. Ian’s paintings focus on technique and the human figure, and he draws on a deep love of history, mythology, spirituality and religion, and his many other interests to approach dense themes as directly as possible through symbolic imagery.
Julie Bancroft
Julie is a visual artist and writer working in North Yorkshire. She creates abstract work in a range of media expressing her experiences of life which relate to universal human experiences. Julie is particularly interested in the idea of impermanence and the ways in which the events in our lives leave traces on us and shape who we are. Julie is currently completing my BA degree in Textiles, where her focus is on the expressive qualities of cloth and stitch and how textile processes can be used to explore loss, trauma and healing. Her current practice is an exploration of the ‘unravelling’ of the self and our relationship with the earth and how this contributes to healing and well being.
Laura Lee
Laura Lee is a ceramicist and works from her studio in Hall Farm Gardens. Local woodlands and forests are the main inspiration for her current artwork. Working primarily with clay she aims to capture the essence of nature which inspires both design and decoration of her pieces. She glazes with gestural marks using various Raku firing techniques which captures movement and energy to her ceramic artworks. Often firing her pieces several times to create variation of colours and depth to the glaze. Her collections are intrinsically linked to environmental issues caused through damage to the natural world through climate change. A recent graduate of 2024 with a First-Class BA (Hons) Fine Art & Crafts having specialising in Ceramics.
Layla Jabbari
Layla Jabbari is a Hull based artist and illustrator. She works with different types of printmaking to tell stories about people she meets in the world around her. Her work is based in observation and rooted in community. Layla aims to celebrate the narratives and connections we all share and enjoy. Her art endeavours to make you smile and recognise the magic in the everyday. Layla graduated from Falmouth University with an MA in illustration with distinction in 2024. She was shortlisted for Yorkshire Ones to Watch at Sunnybank Mills gallery and for the Flourish Excellence in Printmaking award, with WYPW, Huddersfield in 2024. Layla was longlisted for the World Illustration Awards 2023 and tutors with Feral Art college, Hull.
Lou Hazelwood
Lou Hazelwood is a Hull based artist; she has a diverse practice, which sees her investigate how our experiences, personal and cultural, and technologies, historical and contemporary, influence our experience of memory and forgetfulness. Her work takes many forms and responses from sound pieces, text, film, installation, performance and image based. Over the last decade she has been exploring damaged film stock and photographic emulsion, working with a variety of processes to see how film responds. She manipulates the stability of the emulsion and what it ultimately records. Lou worked with household chemicals, considering the domestic family image and recently with woodlands chemicals, embedding permanence in responses to ecological change referencing temporary images produced via the historical process of ‘anthotypes’.
Mary-Ann Stevens
Mary moved to Scarborough in 2021 after completing her MA at Chelsea Art College. Mary has a studio at the Old Parcels Office Artspace. Her work has an edgy, semi-autobiographical narrative, which explores identity and the representation and social expectations of gender. It is characterised by off-beat humour which belies a sense of melancholy. Mary's work in a variety of media, including sculpture, painting and video. She is currently working primarily in sculpture. The crude, bumpy, construction of my papier-mâché sculptures displays a childlike playfulness. The quirky, grotesque characters she creates are odd and unconventional, with a vulnerability that engages the viewer.
Megan Owenson
Meg Owenson is a Scarborough-based artist whose work explores the complex relationship between humans and the natural world. A graduate of Leeds School of Art with a degree in Fine Art, Meg initially honed her skills as a visual development artist in the film and gaming industries, where she worked on concept art and world-building for a variety of well known projects. Her background in visual storytelling has deeply influenced her artistic approach, blending imagination with a grounded exploration of the world around us. Meg has begun building her fine art practice, focusing on both painting and drawing. Through her work, she delves into the intricate patterns, textures, and forces of nature, often considering how we perceive and interact with our environment. Her pieces invite reflection on humanity’s place within the larger ecosystem, questioning our impact and connection to the world we inhabit.
Pennie Metcalfe (PenOfM)
Born and bred in Yorkshire, Pennie studied Fashion and Ceramics at Bradford College and earned a Fine Arts Degree from the University of Derby in 1997. After graduating, Pennie dedicated her life to working in art education, SEN and mental health for over twenty years until 2019, when the results of an injury left her with chronic pain and ill health. She returned to her art practice initially as a form of escapism. There, Pennie discovered that wool's sensory properties were inspirational and therapeutic. She had previously discovered felting in 2010 after attending a felting workshop with her daughter and had been struck back then with the fibre's inexhaustible potential. She now combines her multidisciplinary knowledge and skills to create fibre and textile art. To date, Pennie has exhibited in Northern Ireland and England.
/ Key Dates
12th October 2024
Open of submissions
12th January 2025 11.59pm
Close of submissions
15th Jan - 15th Feb 2025
Judge of submissions
16th February 2025
Finalists notified
28th June 2025
Final artwork submissions delivered to SCAF
24th July 2025
Final judging and presentation evening
/ Judging Panel
Dr Sue Armstrong
MA VetMB VetMFHom CertIAVH MRCVS RsHom
Artistic Director & Trustee of SCAF
Sue Armstrong is the Founder of the Scott Creative Arts Foundation and the current Artistic Director. Sue was a close friend of Michael and Eileen Scott and is dedicated to realising their wishes through the work of the Foundation. Providing support and encouragement to emerging artists was a major priority for the Scott’s and to be holding the fourth SCAF emerging artist award is a testament to her commitment to SCAF. Sue, like the Scotts is a passionate believer in the value of the synergistic relationship between arts and science.
Photo by Damian Bramley - DJB Photography
Louise Ventris
SCAF Emerging Artist Award 2024 Winner
Louise is a Yorkshire-based artist, who explores her creativity through painting, immersing herself in the exploration of urban townscapes. 2024 has been an exciting year for Louise, she had her first solo show at the Mercer Gallery in Harrogate and was awarded the SCAF Emerging Artist Award for her work 'Threads through time, 13 portraits.’
Louise works intuitively with oil paint and has exhibited her work in various open and group exhibitions, including Contemporary Six ‘Coalescence’, Mercer Open, Leeds Summer Show, and the Old Parcels Office in Scarborough. Her work was selected for the group show ‘Prized 2023’ She has recently become an associate member of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts.
Jess Wallace
Artist/Sculptor
Jess rode as a professional National Hunt jockey for six years and on retirement from race riding, attended the Byam Shaw School of Art in London, graduating with distinction. After working with the Natural History Museum making precision drawings, Jess left London for Yorkshire, followed by a small hill farm in West Wales, living with various rescue animals who are the genesis of her work. This has become an intimate record of the distilled moments of this shared existence. Jess finds that working rapidly in very wet clay, from life and memory, allowing the material to play a crucial part in the process, reveals unexpected truths, which are finally cast in bronze.
Debbie Loane
Artist
Debbie Loane trained at Bretton Hall College, Leeds University graduating in 1995 with a BA (hons)1st class in painting. Debbie regularly runs artists workshops in Yorkshire and Scotland and curates exhibitions from her gallery base at Lund Gallery, North Yorkshire.
Recent projects include Artist in Residence on the Cleveland Way National Trail 2019 -2020 and Rahoy Reserve Artist Residency, Sound of Mull 2022 – 2023.
The landscape of the North York Moors and the wild expanses of the north are the inspiration for Debbie’s work.