STUDENT ART PRIZE 2025/26 EXTRACTION

Portrait painting of a person. The person is looking off to the right of the canvas. They have long black straight hair, with a red traditional Korean hat, a silver earing and traditional Korean clothing

Third Place Winner

Imogen Reeves, Grey College
Lijie (2025)
Oil on canvas

“This painting is a depiction of a close friend of mine, (Lijie) Lizzie Kim. I have chosen to paint her dressed in the traditional Korean style of clothing from the latter period of the Joseon Dynasty. I chose to paint this particular composition for the theme of Extraction because I believe that the most compelling approach would be to explore the idea of 'extraction' as it relates to history, culture and the role of women.

Lijie is a first-generation immigrant from South Korea and through painting her in the dress of her ancestors, I am extracting a modern day, British-raised South Korean and placing her in a late 19th century context.

This painting, therefore, invites viewers to contemplate the differences of experience a woman of these two different backgrounds encounters as well as their parallels, illuminated through extracting Lijie from her own period and placing her in that of another woman from hundreds of years ago. The idea of extraction seeks to trigger this all-important conversation of issues around discrimination, perceptions of feminism, racism and misogyny prevalent across the centuries. For this painting, I was inspired by traditional styles of oil painting practiced by the old masters, particularly those of Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Lavinia Fontana, all of which are characterised by stark lighting, luminescent skin and dark backgrounds.”

First Place Winner

Matilda Knowles, College of St Hild and St Bede
Home is a living thing (2026)
Oil on canvas

“The home and the house are one living body with people and furniture and walls and doors and often love. These things all work together to create the perfect image of a home that we all recognise. But at the core of this relationship, what are the things that, if everything else was extracted, would still keep that feeling of home?

Here, I have experimented with extracting the walls, the solid sturdy bones that keep the house up, and I found that many small practices are still possible. Clean sheets still can hang and dry ready to be curled up in later, and other creatures can find a place to raise their young and to rest. This place may not look like a house (or a tree), but it is quite possible that something could make its home here.

So what is at the core of the house-home body? I believe that it is the everyday mundane practices that are simple and boring but that give our lives meaning and allow us to create tiny little worlds where we feel comfortable and safe. We carry these behaviours with us always, which means that we will always find home.”

Painting of an open room with structural beams showing. A washing line hangs across the middle of the room with three pieces of fabric hanging. In the top left corner a nest with an egg in it sits in the beams.

First Place Winner

Matilda Knowles, College of St Hild and St Bede
Home is a living thing (2026)
Oil on canvas

“The home and the house are one living body with people and furniture and walls and doors and often love. These things all work together to create the perfect image of a home that we all recognise. But at the core of this relationship, what are the things that, if everything else was extracted, would still keep that feeling of home?

Here, I have experimented with extracting the walls, the solid sturdy bones that keep the house up, and I found that many small practices are still possible. Clean sheets still can hang and dry ready to be curled up in later, and other creatures can find a place to raise their young and to rest. This place may not look like a house (or a tree), but it is quite possible that something could make its home here.

So what is at the core of the house-home body? I believe that it is the everyday mundane practices that are simple and boring but that give our lives meaning and allow us to create tiny little worlds where we feel comfortable and safe. We carry these behaviours with us always, which means that we will always find home.”

Ceramic sculpture in black of a kneeling miner. They have a miner helmet and are holding an axe in their right hand.

James Fort, University College (Castle)
The Collier (2026)
Ceramic sculpture

“For the theme of “Extraction”, I have chosen to depict a Durham miner. I wanted to celebrate Durham’s history and heritage of coal extraction. Coming from a former mining town myself (Burnley), I appreciate the character and cultural importance around coal extraction and realise how meaningful it is and was to towns such as these. However, I feel that Durham’s character as a mining town is being eclipsed by the university; most would now view Durham as a university town.

Therefore, as a Durham student I thought a fitting way to pay tribute was to represent this character in the student art prize. With all my artworks, I like the medium to represent the themes of the work. For this piece, that meant sculpting with clay, a naturally occurring, extracted resource. I developed a finishing technique which allowed me to make the sculpture look like coal, which further emphasises this.”

People's Vote Winner

Chahat Garg, Van Mildert College
Extracting Sweetness: Visuals from Love & Memory (2025)
Oil on canvas

“This painting engages with extraction as an everyday, often unnoticed act. We extract segments from an orange to eat it; pluck flowers from trees to give, marking affection, celebration, or care. These gestures feel natural, even gentle, yet involve taking from the source and carrying it forward. Honey appears as both literal extract from nature and metaphor for what’s preserved after time and experience distil what mattered most.

My grandfather put honey in everything, believing sweetness softened life. He loved sweets as I do, a shared habit as quiet inheritance. The flowers reference his garden. On visits, he’d pluck one from the tree into my hand. That giving was extraction creating connection. Isolating these objects, I extract fragments of personal history from the ordinary.

The painting reflects how love exists through small removals and offerings, how meaning carries when taken away, and how memory, sweetness and gesture nourish long after the source is gone.”

Painting on a black background of a jar of orange liquid. Around the jar sit two white flowers to the left, in the middle three orange segments and to the right a whole orange.

People's Vote Winner

Chahat Garg, Van Mildert College
Extracting Sweetness: Visuals from Love & Memory (2025)
Oil on canvas

“This painting engages with extraction as an everyday, often unnoticed act. We extract segments from an orange to eat it; pluck flowers from trees to give, marking affection, celebration, or care. These gestures feel natural, even gentle, yet involve taking from the source and carrying it forward. Honey appears as both literal extract from nature and metaphor for what’s preserved after time and experience distil what mattered most.

My grandfather put honey in everything, believing sweetness softened life. He loved sweets as I do, a shared habit as quiet inheritance. The flowers reference his garden. On visits, he’d pluck one from the tree into my hand. That giving was extraction creating connection. Isolating these objects, I extract fragments of personal history from the ordinary.

The painting reflects how love exists through small removals and offerings, how meaning carries when taken away, and how memory, sweetness and gesture nourish long after the source is gone.”

Centre for Visual Art and Culture Special Mention

Chris Smith, St Aidan’s College
Interaction (2026)
Oil on canvas

“This painting arose from a conversation with a former miner. He described how following the pit closures, many of his colleagues came to Durham University to study theology. This movement from material resource extraction toward acts of spiritual offering, struck an emotional chord which I brought into form. What had been an industry of removal from the earth, gave way toward gestures of prayer - an equivocal giving back.

I sought to hold this reciprocal collision between physical and immaterial. Two ethereal, ghostlike figures pass a flower between them, a gesture of exchange situated within a memory of a coalfield, now a coppered heather moorland. Thin veils of transparent iron oxide pigment are spread across a sombre indigo ground. These materials echo both the mineral residue of the land, as well as a more atmospheric, immaterial presence. The painting becomes a place where matter encounters spirit.”

Abstract painting showing two figures, one passes a flower to the other.

Centre for Visual Art and Culture Special Mention

Chris Smith, St Aidan’s College
Interaction (2026)
Oil on canvas

“This painting arose from a conversation with a former miner. He described how following the pit closures, many of his colleagues came to Durham University to study theology. This movement from material resource extraction toward acts of spiritual offering, struck an emotional chord which I brought into form. What had been an industry of removal from the earth, gave way toward gestures of prayer - an equivocal giving back.

I sought to hold this reciprocal collision between physical and immaterial. Two ethereal, ghostlike figures pass a flower between them, a gesture of exchange situated within a memory of a coalfield, now a coppered heather moorland. Thin veils of transparent iron oxide pigment are spread across a sombre indigo ground. These materials echo both the mineral residue of the land, as well as a more atmospheric, immaterial presence. The painting becomes a place where matter encounters spirit.

Painting of a nude torso. In between the persons breasts we see the canvas has a cut out. In the cut out we see a beaded heart.

Second Place Prize

Hannah Ruth Andrews, University College (Castle)
Am I Prettier Like This? (2026)
Acrylic on canvas and beading on fabric

“When thinking of the many possible meanings of ‘extraction’ I kept coming back to the idea of unwillingness. Extraction’s intrinsic link to force and violence appeared obvious to me and they struck a personal note. This piece is an exploration of that violence and violation which I felt so acutely.

The female nude is often viewed as an ideal in art. In a rebellion to this I have stripped away the pretences of artists and chosen to focus on a presenting, sexualised body with no face and no identity. I wanted to reflect the dehumanising reality we face when we are viewed not as people but as objects to be taken from.

The rip in the canvas manifests this violence physically and allows us to glimpse the heart of the subject, a heart we could reach out and take for ourselves. The use of beadwork is meant to evoke images of the precious gems extracted through mining, gems we rip from the earth at the cost of so much and so many just for our materialist pleasure. I chose the heart both to convey the bloody sadism of extraction and the humanity of my subject. Cut open yet still alive.”

M.T. Affandi, Ustinov College
Hope Prevails (2026)
Acrylic and ink on canvas

“Almost a thousand people died in the recent flood in Sumatra, Indonesia. While the weather is often blamed for causing the flood, it is evident that illegal logging has contributed to this devastating disaster. During the first minutes of flood, logs filled the scene, demonstrating the ugliness of this extraction.

This painting tries to express that, despite the catastrophe, hope remains and prevails. It is the time to flourish, rise and say that those souls did not die in vain.

Hope will give birth to new souls that understand the unity of our existence and the nature. It is the time to change the way we see nature, the way we take care of it, the way we love it.”

Abstract painting of a plant, surrounded by 7 tree stumps. Above the plant the see blue lines and a sun like shape.

M.T. Affandi, Ustinov College
Hope Prevails (2026)
Acrylic and ink on canvas

“Almost a thousand people died in the recent flood in Sumatra, Indonesia. While the weather is often blamed for causing the flood, it is evident that illegal logging has contributed to this devastating disaster. During the first minutes of flood, logs filled the scene, demonstrating the ugliness of this extraction.

This painting tries to express that, despite the catastrophe, hope remains and prevails. It is the time to flourish, rise and say that those souls did not die in vain.

Hope will give birth to new souls that understand the unity of our existence and the nature. It is the time to change the way we see nature, the way we take care of it, the way we love it.”

BFI Special Award for Moving Image

Eila O’Connor, John Snow College
Parenthood (2026)
Digital animation

“The theme of extraction made me think of what can be taken from a person and given to another. The greatest example of this is the sacrifice a parent must make for their child.

I wanted to portray this as the flower is extracted of its life but in turn this gives way to bloom multiple beautiful other flowers. It also repeats to show this cycle of parenthood and the willingness to do this.”

BFI Special Award for Moving Image

Eila O’Connor, John Snow College
Parenthood (2026)
Digital animation

“The theme of extraction made me think of what can be taken from a person and given to another. The greatest example of this is the sacrifice a parent must make for their child.

I wanted to portray this as the flower is extracted of its life but in turn this gives way to bloom multiple beautiful other flowers. It also repeats to show this cycle of parenthood and the willingness to do this.”

Painting of a hill with houses on. Above the hill a dragon is flying. Around the dragon we see clouds, writing and swirl patterns.

Lucy Hobson, Van Mildert College
Hoard of Coal (2026)
Watercolour and charcoal on canvas

“In my piece, ‘Hoard of Coal’, I have linked the theme of extraction to that of my Welsh identity and Wales’s mining history. I have utilised the stereotypical symbolic figure of the Welsh Dragon flying above a ‘hill’ of coal in order to illustrate the tension between the national, mythological identity of the nation and that which was built upon industry and extraction from the land.

The cottages and castle that populate the coal reflect how Welsh communities and towns have been constructed upon such extraction. The scorched earth and dead plants reflect the damage and environmental decline that results from the impact of fossil fuels. The stripping of the land reflects the extraction and erosion of the Welsh identity, culture and language over the past couple of centuries.

I have also experimented with text, painting traditional Welsh hymns into the sky and land, reflecting how, despite the largely dying nature of the language, it is still intrinsically inscribed into and buried within the industrial narrative of our country. Through this piece, I wish to convey extraction as a form of both heritage and harm, something that can shape a culture and identity while simultaneously threatening to erode it.”

Olivia Feather-Moore, St Chad’s College
Mick (2026)
Acrylic and collage on canvas

“This painting explores extraction through the framework of reality television. In an episode of Wife Swap, Mick watches as his wife temporarily enters the home of a wealthier man. As the dynamic unfolds, he visibly breaks down. His sense of manhood feels threatened, through his wife’s trial husband’s lifestyle. Mick expresses shame as he can’t give his wife the life her trial husband can.

Reality television is inherently extractive. These social experiments are constructed for entertainment. They rely on voyeurism, on engineered tension, on the mining of insecurity and conflict for audience consumption. The participants’ emotions are not incidental; they are the product. Yet within that system of exploitation, this episode revealed something genuine. Amid the manipulation and spectacle, there was a moment that felt undeniably real: a man confronting the fragility of his identity in a culture that ties masculinity to provision and wealth.

This painting focuses on that rupture. While television extracts drama for ratings, I aim to extract the unguarded humanity that briefly surfaced beneath the format.”

Painting of a persons face with glasses. The persons mouth is covered with collages of tv stills, a barcode and a yellow smiley face.

Olivia Feather-Moore, St Chad’s College
Mick (2026)
Acrylic and collage on canvas

“This painting explores extraction through the framework of reality television. In an episode of Wife Swap, Mick watches as his wife temporarily enters the home of a wealthier man. As the dynamic unfolds, he visibly breaks down. His sense of manhood feels threatened, through his wife’s trial husband’s lifestyle. Mick expresses shame as he can’t give his wife the life her trial husband can.

Reality television is inherently extractive. These social experiments are constructed for entertainment. They rely on voyeurism, on engineered tension, on the mining of insecurity and conflict for audience consumption. The participants’ emotions are not incidental; they are the product. Yet within that system of exploitation, this episode revealed something genuine. Amid the manipulation and spectacle, there was a moment that felt undeniably real: a man confronting the fragility of his identity in a culture that ties masculinity to provision and wealth.

This painting focuses on that rupture. While television extracts drama for ratings, I aim to extract the unguarded humanity that briefly surfaced beneath the format.”

A black abstract sculpture showing an almost figure dangling from a black line.

Jude Ramsden, College of St Hild and St Bede
Anything That Moves (2026)
Mixed media sculpture

“Our lives are increasingly marked with a series of small and painful extractions imposed upon ourselves and our natural world. We oftentimes come to terms with our culpability for suffering in terms of magnitude, or in terms of intent, but the outcome often remains the same regardless of our own interpretation of guilt. A generation’s worth of greed, and of force, and of conquest has bled the worth of the world with a thousand cuts, and our blame has been waved away just as quickly we can perpetrate it.

The figure you are seeing is a response to this suffering. It cannot move. It cannot see. It cannot drink or feed.

It suffocates in plastic and hangs from its umbilical. It remains, in effect, a vessel to impart our worst impulses upon and then to be consumed – as spectacle and as penance.

To understand it, to interrogate its feelings – if it can feel – is irrelevant.

We wouldn’t be bothered to find out in the first place.”

Ezra Corbett, Stephenson College
It’s Not Halloween (2023)
Acrylic on paper

“My interpretation for the theme of extraction is very related to grief. The loss of a loved one is an inevitable part of nature, and yet it feels world ending to experience. The painting explores the feelings that come with having someone forcefully taken away from you.

The sole figure walking at the bottom of the page is placed upon an unruly path, framed by towering shadowing trees that block out the surrounding landscape. The brushstrokes are bold and the edges of the painting are left ragged and unfinished. The cool blue tone reflects the numbness and suffering losing someone can cause, but more importantly, the pale sky shows a hint of orange that shines softly through the tree branches, that life does go on.

This work was painted the day my grandfather passed away. He died very abruptly, and I spent the day looking after my sister and trying to pass the time with art. He was a talented artist who always supported my work, he taught me how to draw dogs, hence my choice of animal depicted in the painting.”

Ezra Corbett, Stephenson College
It’s Not Halloween (2023)
Acrylic on paper

“My interpretation for the theme of extraction is very related to grief. The loss of a loved one is an inevitable part of nature, and yet it feels world ending to experience. The painting explores the feelings that come with having someone forcefully taken away from you.

The sole figure walking at the bottom of the page is placed upon an unruly path, framed by towering shadowing trees that block out the surrounding landscape. The brushstrokes are bold and the edges of the painting are left ragged and unfinished. The cool blue tone reflects the numbness and suffering losing someone can cause, but more importantly, the pale sky shows a hint of orange that shines softly through the tree branches, that life does go on.

This work was painted the day my grandfather passed away. He died very abruptly, and I spent the day looking after my sister and trying to pass the time with art. He was a talented artist who always supported my work, he taught me how to draw dogs, hence my choice of animal depicted in the painting.”

Yueru Yan, St Aidan’s College
The Universe (2026)
Digital animation

“This is a story about memory and love, extracting fragments of memories from different universes. Vibrant symbols like the sea, sunset, and cherry blossoms represent the story I want to tell. Each extraction means stripping a lover's existence from the causality of a certain world, and those lovers in those worlds disappear along with them.

Ultimately, the protagonist merges the collected fragments, reconstructing a complete image of their lover. In reality, their lover has passed away, but those memories, like a revolving lantern, eventually become a universe belonging to their love.”

Yueru Yan, St Aidan’s College
The Universe (2026)
Digital animation

“This is a story about memory and love, extracting fragments of memories from different universes. Vibrant symbols like the sea, sunset, and cherry blossoms represent the story I want to tell. Each extraction means stripping a lover's existence from the causality of a certain world, and those lovers in those worlds disappear along with them.

Ultimately, the protagonist merges the collected fragments, reconstructing a complete image of their lover. In reality, their lover has passed away, but those memories, like a revolving lantern, eventually become a universe belonging to their love.”

History of the prize