“Slow Puncture,” Harriet Bowman’s traveling Mark Tanner Sculpture Award exhibition, features 12 sculptures that encompass casting, layering, mold-making, and construction. Glass and metal predominate, though horsehair, rubber, clay, and leather also enter into the mix...
Read more at sculpturemagazine.art
Katharina Fitz, who lives and works in Nottingham, is the 24th winner of the annual sculpture prize and receives: £10,000 towards the production of new work over the coming year; a funded solo exhibition at Standpoint in 2027; and a National Touring Programme.
A huge congratulations to Kira Freije shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2026. Kira kindly acted as a panel judge for the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award 2025/26 for which we are very grateful.
Kira Freije
Nominated for her first major solo exhibition, Unspeak the Chorus at The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire. Freije uses metal, fabric and found materials to create sculptures that explore universal human emotions. Her theatrical tableau features life-size figures constructed from bare metal armatures and expressive, stonecast faces in poses that are at once unsettling and beautiful. The jury praised the emotional depth of Freije’s work, highlighting its unique sculptural vocabulary of materials and forms, as well as the haunting, expressive way she transformed the space through her arrangement of figures.
The members of the Turner Prize 2026 jury are: Sarah Allen, Head of Programme, South London Gallery, Joe Hill, Director & Chief Executive, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Sook-Kyung Lee, Director, The Whitworth and Professor of Curatorial Practices at The University of Manchester and Alona Pardo, Director, Arts Council Collection, UK. The jury is chaired by Alex Farquharson, Director, Tate Britain.
Read more at theguardian.com
Eight artists are shortlisted for the £10,000 award, which offers the winner financial support towards the production of new work, a solo exhibition at Standpoint Gallery, London, plus a National Touring Programme.
Harriet Bowman’s exhibition Slow Puncture at Cross Lane Projects, Kendal, is reviewed by Martin Holman in Art Monthly (April 2026, issue 495).
Bowman’s casts and constructions offer a relationship between object and meaning that feels inventive, compelling and fresh.
Read more at artmonthly.co.uk
On this overcast late winter’s day, the wide windowed facade of Cross Lane Projects is a beacon on its suburban Kendal street. Harriet Bowman’s Slow Puncture is opening this evening and finishing touches are being made in the gallery space. Slow Puncture comprises twenty-five glass, metal, rubber and ceramic works, displayed across the gallery. These sculptural works are made from found materials: punctured or blown out tyres, smashed windscreen glass, clay from the family farm. Large pieces of fused glass, heated together in a kiln, are held up with welded metal frames and pulverised tyres, now chunks of rubber, are laid out across the floor.
Read more at corridor8.co.uk
We would like to extend our congratulations to Nnena Kalu on winning the Turner Prize. We are elated by her victory and the recognition and validation she receives by being chosen as the winner this year.
Following her application to the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award (2020/21), where she displayed her extraordinary talent, the selection panel, which included artist Eva Rothschild and curator Lewis Dalton Gilbert, identified that Nnena’s practice was extremely strong and would benefit from further support. She was awarded a one off grant by MTSA, with which Nnena, also a recipient of the LOEWE FOUNDATION / Studio Voltaire Award, was able to continue working full time in her studio at Studio Voltaire, ActionSpace’s South London studio since 1999.
ActionSpace is a London based visual arts organisation supporting artists with learning disabilities in developing their artistic practices. The special grant helped to provide Nnena with supported studio time for a six month period.
Clara Hastrup was announced as the 23rd winner of the annual sculpture prize and receives: £10,000 towards the production of new work over the coming year; a funded solo exhibition at Standpoint in 2026; and a National Touring Programme
I felt naked walking through this show without a hooded cloak or knowledge of a secret handshake. From the leather vessels filled with water to the ominous clubs that look like giant dinosaur fangs, everything here appears destined to be used in some kind of underground hazing ceremony. Incorporating ceramic, leather and wood, these mysterious hybrid sculptures by Nat Breitenstein hint at function but mostly instil a foggy sense of familiarity.
Read more at londonartroundup.com
Steph Huang is the 21st winner of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award in 2023-24, the most significant award for emerging UK artists working in the field of sculpture. Alongside the works created from the MTSA, Huang premieres a new piece commissioned by the University of Salford Art Collection and esea contemporary, developed during a residency in Manchester. This work will enter the University of Salford Art Collection as a permanent legacy of the project.
Read more at eseacontemporary.org
Harriet Bowman, who lives and works in Bristol, is the 22nd winner of the annual sculpture prize and receives: £10,000 towards the production of new work over the coming year; a funded solo exhibition at Standpoint in 2025; and a National Touring Programme.
We are delighted to share that MTSA 2023/24 winner Steph Huang will be exhibiting a new installation of sculptures, film and sound, highlighting the environmental effects of fishing and shipping at Tate Britain.
Read more at tate.org.uk
Standpoint announced the 2024 Mark Tanner Sculpture Award shortlisted artists: Harriet Bowman, Guendalina Cerruti, Enej Gala, Agata Madejska, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, Anna Perach, Madeleine Pledge and Davinia-Ann Robinson.
Living on-site for two weeks during construction, and combing through thousands of repurposed objects sourced from his decades of collecting...Holden has brought confounding and chameleonic layers of depth to the space, at times industrial, theatrical, funereal, medical, celebratory, technological, playful, transactional and parapolitical. From the soft play to the oil rig, Universal Bridge reimagines the role of technology in the human sphere.
Read more at corridor8.co.uk
My idea of making sculpture is that it’s possible to charge materials with a sort of low-fi power. When you invest enough energy into making an object it can acquire a special sort of resonance.
Read more at floorrmagazine.com
Standpoint is delighted to announce the 2023-24 Mark Tanner Sculpture Award shortlisted artists.
The eight shortlisted artists are Hermione Allsopp (East Sussex), Claye Bowler (Derby), Rosie Gibbens (London), Steph Huang (London), Rosie McGinn (London), Laura Ní Fhlaibhín (London), Abigail Norris (East Sussex) and Laura Yuile (Manchester).
Laurence Noga’s paintings and constructions stand between conventional two-dimensional surfaces of colour and line and jazzy amalgams of wall-mounted three-dimensional shapes. The artist has candidly spoken about being influenced – an overused but here appropriate term – by Schwitters and Paolozzi amongst others, something that is plainly “declared” in these works whilst being tightly held in check by the strength of Noga’s own sensibility and approach. There’s a sort of bravado in operation in Noga’s practice, a jamming together of painting and assemblage that in some ways just shouldn’t succeed, and yet does.
Read more at ledocument.com
Lee Holden is the 20th winner of the annual sculpture prize and receives: £10,000 towards the production of new work over the coming year; a solo exhibition at Standpoint in 2023; and a National Touring Programme.
Standpoint
Welcome to a future that has always been, where resurrected technology suggests everlasting life and highlights an end point. These are the possibilities and contradictions inhabiting Dean Kenning’s unique kinetic sculptures. Using lo-fi technology, including old portable cassette players, synthesizer keyboards, and disco light motors, along with cheap computing parts, he creates curiously creature-like moving sculptures that put an endearing face on a deeply considered art practice...
Read more at deankenning.com
The ‘crawler’ robots that populate Dean Kenning’s exhibition, Evolutionary Love, are part of a critical trajectory that the artist has been developing for some time, since rejecting the ‘dominant mode of tastefully arranged, one-liner conceptual works’ that he found prevalent on graduating from art school.
Read more at corridor8.co.uk
We are thrilled to announce that two of Olivia Bax's Mark Tanner Sculpture Award works have been acquired by the Ingram Collection.
The Ingram Collection of Modern British Art is one of the largest and most significant publicly accessible collections of Modern British art in the UK, available to all through a programme of loans and exhibitions.
Both works were made as part of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award exhibition, which started at Standpoint then travelled to Cross Lane Projects, Kendal, and Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Penzance.
Read more at ingramcollection.com
The works on display were made from elements of re-engineered obsolete technology alongside materials that resemble a more organic humanness, like wax and foam. The robots were programmed with the help of creative computing educator and coder Llewelyn Fernandes.
Read more at creativetourist.com
London-based Olivia Bax makes brightly colored sculptures whose tactile, handmade aesthetic derives from the pulp and papier-mâché that she uses to cover steel, chicken wire, and foam armatures. Though her objects echo elements of the observable world, they create their own universe and logic; likewise they may allude to function, with handles, funnels, and receptacles, but any usefulness is (mostly) illusory.
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Standpoint is pleased to announce Nnena Kalu had been awarded a Mark Tanner Sculpture Grant. Nnena was awarded the one-off £4,000 grant following this year’s MTSA shortlisted interviews. The panel identified that Nnena would benefit from additional supported time in her ActionSpace studio and a grant to enable this would make a beneficial impact on the artist’s sculptural practice and future development.
We are thrilled to announce that two of Olivia Bax's Mark Tanner Sculpture Award works have been acquired by the Arts Council Collection.
The Arts Council revealed today the full list of works that have been acquired for the Arts Council Collection in 2020–21. They include Grille (landscape) and Hopper from Bax's MTSA exhibition OFF GRID.
Read more at artscouncilcollection.org.uk
Dean Kenning and Emma Cousin talk about diagramming, John Latham, gravity and pigeons and get into where his kinetic sculpture began in the first place. We talk about the aesthetics of kinetic art and Dean gets into lucozade bottles and pointless fingers. We discuss his recently won Mark Tanner award and the current ideas in progress for it. We talk about dumb vs clever, looking at the stars and trying to leave space to be irritated.
Read more at anchor.fm
To mitigate the psychic impact of all manners of impending doom, like anticipating a loved one’s death or being crushed by the canon, Collar’s work ciphers what the mind cannot possibly hold. She is doing dreamwork for those of us with calamitous dispositions. Her objects are culled from the manifest calm of millpond dreams; their essence is the unmentionable. by Sabrina Tarasoff
Read more at moussemagazine.it
As with many of the other works here, the ability to view ‘Kingpin’ from various angles and heights, even through holes in its own body, encourages closer inspection, intent investigation and physical movement to truly experience the whole work. This promotion of exploration and even reframing of other works as you see them through ‘Kingpin’ is more than just a creative strategy but also a valuable lesson for life – look more, be curious, consider other perspectives.
Read more at corridor8.co.uk
Olivia Bax and I chat about the weather, the weight of it and the frustration of it, like being the under slanted weather. We talk about her show "Off Grid" at Standpoint Gallery, and the delay caused by Lockdown in March and what this afforded and affected. Olivia talks about research as process and we discuss the pace and rhythms of the studio.
Read more at anchor.fm
For a good few years now ‘Standpoint’ has run the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award. The show due to take place this May was by 2019-20 Winner Olivia Bax. The combined factors of a solo show of an artist on the up postponed on Coronet Street due to Corona Virus seemed so alliteratively and linguistically linked it managed to grab my critical attention...
Read more at a-n.co.uk
The futuristic blends with the primordial in the work of British sculptor Anna Reading. Her otherworldly forms call to mind remnants of a crashed space capsule overgrown with foreign matter or submerged manmade structures that have succumbed to marine accretions...
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Ideas for new work tend to grow organically out of previous works; something I want to change or try differently. I have conversations with the work as I make. I am interested in what the piece has to tell me.
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Introducing the Isolation Interviews: a new series of weekly artist profiles highlighting current concerns, accompanied by a selection of available works.
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The Pothole comprises a series of sculptures installed across a floor of vinyl collages produced during 2019 – 2020. The work really began in 2018 on a boat trip to the Scottish Island of Staffa.
Read more at corridor8.co.uk
A strong representation of sculpture at the Fair includes Standpoint Gallery’s works by Frances Richardson and Olivia Bax (both winners of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award)...
Read more at artsandcollections.com
This month we're over the moon to share with you an interview with London based sculptor Olivia Bax who has got us thinking about the way we see things...
Read more at alexandralunn.com
A London-based artist who creates large-scale sculptural forms composed of steel, chicken wire and paper pulp has won the 2019-20 Mark Tanner Sculpture Award (MTSA)...
Read more at a-n.co.uk
Anna Reading is a London-based artist working from her studio at The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, a non-profit artist space set in north London’s Archway. Crafting sculptures primarily from found materials, Reading conjures looming statues from other worlds...
Read more at boundary-online.com
The show is a dialogue between Wilding and Leeds-born Frances Richardson who is showing Because the two parts don’t quite touch (2019)—a looped structure surrounded by a pair of boulders—among other works. Asked if her works dovetail with Wilding's, she says...
Read more at theartnewspaper.com
Rebecca Scott’s huge oil paintings of defaced magazine pages. It’s a visceral exhibition by a confident painter, secure in her style, able to wow us with colour. Look at the young women in their orangey-red, glowing towards us in burnt scarlet, in cherry-red satsuma, leering out of a dark teal scene...
Read more at artlyst.com
This year’s awardee, Frances Richardson, is showing a body of new work investigating the dualities of objects and space, thought and measurement, emotions and intellect...
Read more at corridor8.co.uk
The MTSA promotes emerging artists in three-dimensional art. But who is behind the award? What criteria does an application have to meet. And what do the last two winners have to say about the award? We found out for you...
Read more at sculpture-network.org
Oct 2018
Frances Richardson: Cross Lane Projects, Kendal, welcomes a major UK sculpture award as it is shown outside of London for the first time.
Read more at artlyst.com
Oct 2018
On the occasion of her Mark Tanner Sculpture Award exhibition at Standpoint Gallery, Frances Richardson, the 2017-18 winner, selects Still Water for 3rd Dimension’s ‘Masterpiece in a Nutshell’ series...
Read more at 3rd-dimensionpmsa.org.uk
July 2018
Anna Reading has been announced as the winner of the 2018–2019 Mark Tanner Sculpture Award...
Read more at artreview.com
May 2018
Chosen from a shortlist of eight, London-based artist Anna Reading has won the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award 2018-19...
Read more at a-n.co.uk
May 2018
Beth Collar’s Thinking Here Of How The Words Formulate Inside My Head As I Am Just Thinking draws its title from a previous performance by the artist...
Read more at mattsgallery.org
May 2018
The eight shortlisted artists for the £8,000 award which offers the winner both financial support towards the production of new work and a solo exhibition at Standpoint Gallery, London, are...
Read more at a-n.co.uk
April 2018
Without a doubt repetition and appropriation are crucial concepts in contemporary art practice. Employing a wide selection of media that ranges from video installation and sculpture to photography and drawing...
Read more at thisistomorrow.info
February 2018
"I’m in the studio almost every day, and usually begin the day with two to three hours of thinking, almost as if I’m finding or retracing my way back into a painting..."
Read more at floorrmagazine.com
June 2017
Frances Richardson has been announced as the winner of the 2017–2018 Mark Tanner Sculpture Award...
Read more at artreview.com
April 2017
Kate Lyddon is a multi-disciplinary artist working across drawing, painting and sculpture, her work explores the boundaries of what is considered normal and what is perverse...
Read more at fadmagazine.com
September 2016
Pippa Koszerek talks to artist Beth Collar about how a 2014 residency at Glasgow Women's Library has influenced the sculptures that she is currently showing...
Read more at a-n.co.uk
August 2016
Bristol based artist wins £8,000 award to create new work for solo exhibition at artist-run London gallery Standpoint in 2017...
Read more at a-n.co.uk
March 2016