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:
Art is inseparable from Heritage. Each act of creation is shaped by what has come before it: by the stories, materials and traditions that form our identities and cultures. Heritage is often deeply rooted in people, place or ritual. It shapes how we express ourselves and can determine how we connect our past with our present and, in turn, what we carry into the future.
This year, the theme for our Emerging Artist Award is Heritage. We are inviting artists to reflect on and respond to the stories, identities, and influences that shape who we are. Your work might explore personal memories, cultural traditions, social history, architectural legacy or anything else that speaks to what we inherit and what we choose to pass on. We invite you to draw from the legacy of your communities, ancestors, environments and experiences to reflect on the past and how you use it to inform the future.
/ THE FINALISTS
CASSY OLIPHANT
Cassy's creative practice explores the intersection between Chinese and European folklore, inherited craft traditions and the shifting nature of cultural identity. She moves between painting, textile, and photographic processes. These techniques provide material metaphors for her creative explorations. Embroidery nods towards layering and a subsequent call to repair, Stitching connects her to the Singaporean Peranakan heritage within her family, while cyanotype's play of light and shadow mirrors the revealing and obscuring of family memory.
Thematically, myth and folklore sit alongside personal family narratives, allowing imagined and inherited histories to converge. By contrasting Chinese and European stories, she examines how myths change through translation, through geographical distance and the act of retelling. This echoes the ways memory itself alters across generations. These interwoven processes reimagines cultural memory as something porous and alive, a dialogue between myth and material, between collective tradition and the intimate terrain of personal history.
DEE HOLT
Dee is an artist and researcher working with analogue and experimental pinhole photography to explore the relationships between environment, time, and community. Her MFA examined the UK coastline, using polluted and found seawater in the photographic process to embody environmental degradation.
She is currently pursuing a PhD on community action and blue spaces, researching how photography can support environmental activism and collective reflection. Based in Yorkshire, her practice engages with coastal heritage and ecological futures through handmade cameras and sustainable methods. She is an emerging artist and have no exclusive gallery representation.
JAMES BRIGGS
Briggs’ sculptural practice is rooted in site-specificity, focusing on transforming and reinterpreting physical spaces to invite new ways of seeing and engaging with the environment. Central to his work is a process of deconstructing and reconstructing spatial elements, reworking what already exists to create installations that slow perception and draw attention to the unseen. His practice encourages reflective engagement with the built world, prompting a reconsideration of how space is experienced individually and collectively.
Architecture plays a recurring role in Briggs’ visual language. He is drawn to structural forms that shape everyday navigation, columns, beams, angles, and shadows that subtly guide movement and awareness. By abstracting and recontextualizing these familiar forms, Briggs evokes memory, place, and temporality. Rather than replicating architecture, his work reimagines it through form, material, and negative space, suggesting what once existed, what remains, and what might return.
KAREN HORSFALL
Karen's ceramic sculptures explore the memories held within clothing and the objects we wear every day. Garments absorb the shape of the body, traces of movement, labour and time; they become silent witnesses to lived experience. Through clay, she translates these soft, intimate forms into something fixed and enduring, reflecting the way memories shift from lived moments into physical and emotional imprints.
Clothing carries personal and collective histories, hand-me-downs, workwear, ceremonial dress, each shaped by identity, place and tradition. By recreating these forms in ceramic, she invites the viewer to consideration what is remembered, what is worn away, and what remains. The fragility of fired clay echoes the vulnerability of memory, while its permanence speaks to the desire to preserve what might otherwise be lost.
LUCY KENT
Lucy Kent is an artist/maker who grew up in West Yorkshire and studied Textiles at Manchester School of Art. She works in a range of mediums utilising paper, pine needles, metal, plants and fabric.
Drawing underpins her practice; exploring the delicacy of materials through intensive and repetitive making processes, her work is situated between drawing and sculpture. Ephemerality and transience are common themes within her work, helping to ground the viewer in the present moment. By creating art with found, natural, and recycled materials, she invites both herself and the viewer to take a more holistic approach to understanding the world around them.
LYDIA RIDLEY
Lydia is drawn to human turmoil and tragedy always. As a figurative fine artist, she finds beauty in all the dramatics, theatrics, and intricacies that life has to offer. Within her work, she tries to serve those who have been ostracised by society, particularly those who are made to feel othered due to their sexuality or gender, and therefore struggle to find themselves within history and art. She uses traditional mediums such as oil paint, graphite, and charcoal to explore classical and historical tales along with mirroring classical aesthetics to highlight how we who fit outside of the lines of social normality have always existed. We can recognise ourselves in antiquity as long as we look hard enough.
MARIA DONNAI
Maria is a visual artist based in Hull, working primarily with glass and ceramics. She intentionally uses these delicate materials to encourage reflection on the fragility of nature and ongoing concerns around species extinction.
Inspired by natural history collections, her work consists of multiple small pieces that are assembled as sculptures or installations, often taking a museological style in their presentation.
MARTIN GITTINS
Martin Gittins is a British landscape painter working primarily in oils, exploring the tension between the natural world and the built environment. Living in the North York Moors National Park, his practice is shaped by the region’s layered histories - where industry and settlement meet notions of nature and wilderness. Martin creates works that blend real and invented forms, revealing the traces of human intervention within seemingly remote landscapes.
Recent series of works, 'Floating Cities of North Yorkshire' and 'Projections', investigate architectonic or rectilinear structures emerging from moorland, cliffs and former industrial sites. These imagined forms act as speculative architectures - echoes of the region’s mining heritage, hidden infrastructures and unrealised futures. Through these works Martin explore how landscapes hold memory, how extraction reshapes identity, and how new forms can re-emerge from what has been lost, forgotten or buried.
MORVARID ALAVIFARD
Morvarid is an Iranian multidisciplinary/precious metal artist based in the UK, working primarily through silversmithing and precious metal techniques. Her practice is rooted in her lived experience as an Iranian woman and explores how objects carry memory, emotion, and resistance through touch. She approaches metal as both material and language, using traditional processes to question ideas of value, permanence, and control.
Central to her work is the belief that destruction can be a form of creation. Through cutting, fracturing, inlaying, and rejoining metal, she translates internal and collective experiences into physical form. These acts mirror processes of survival, adaptation, and transformation. By working with inherited craft techniques while altering their use, she engages with heritage as something active and evolving. Her work invites close, tactile engagement, allowing viewers to encounter vulnerability, strength, and unspoken narratives held within the material.
ZIVARNA MURPHY
Zivarna is a research-based ceramic artist, having trained in Medical Anthropology and holding a PhD in Human Sciences she brings emergent themes from her research around the social aspects of body and organ donation, namely loss, grief, transformation, and emotion, into her ceramic vessels. On visits to her local East Yorkshire coastline, she observes the erosion and loss of this landscape body as a metaphor for human loss.
Zivarna hand-forms her tactile vessels from stoneware and porcelain, layered with eroded wild boulder clay and impressed shells, rocks and fossils, all gathered from this coastline, imbuing each piece with a strong sense of place and connection. The forms draw upon structures she sees in her local landscape such as fossilised shell bodies, ebbing cliffs and sea formed rocks. She is interested in firing as a transformative process and the becoming of the vessel body.
/ Key Dates
3rd October 2025
Open for submissions
4th January 2026 11.59pm
Close of submissions
5th Jan - 15th Feb 2026
Judging of submissions
17th February 2026
Finalists notified
4th July 2026
Final artwork submissions delivered to SCAF
23rd July 2026
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.
Shirley Hudson
Artist: Painter and Sculptor
Originally from Oxfordshire and now based in Yorkshire, Shirley Hudson is a fine artist whose work is deeply inspired by the landscape. Alongside creating her own artwork, she is actively involved in community-based art projects. Shirley received traditional training in sculpture and printmaking, gaining extensive hands-on experience with a variety of materials and techniques. Her passion for teaching has led her to work in Adult Education, and she currently facilitates art sessions at Henshaws. Her community work includes A Place at the Table, a portrait series of individuals experiencing homelessness in Harrogate; participation in the Portraits for NHS Heroes initiative; and paintings created in support of the Cancer and Pisces Trust. Shirley's artwork has been exhibited across the region and is held in private collections.
Mouse
Artist: Sculptor
Mouse is a Bradford-based, self-taught sculptor whose work explores infinity, consciousness, and abstract form. Working primarily in wood, his practice combines material sensitivity with philosophical inquiry. Since being named runner-up for the 2024 Emerging Artist Award with SCAF, Mouse has exhibited with Scarborough Museums, Ferens Art Gallery, and other notable venues. Committed to sustainability, he pursues large-scale works that deepen his dialogue with nature while pushing the possibilities of form.
Lou Hazelwood
Winner of the SCAF Emerging Artist Award 2025
Lou Hazelwood is a Hull based artist, exhibiting regionally, nationally and internationally; 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’.