We’re delighted to announce this year’s Emerging Artist Bursary Award winners. Bursaries are aimed at those taking their first steps into professional arts practice, returning to creative practice after a career break or change, or currently taking their art in a new direction.
The award aims to nurture and encourage new talent to take the next steps in their career by helping to fund their participation in this prestigious event.
This year’s winners are:
During Open Studios, Erica will be showing visitors her sketchbooks, work in progress and ongoing experiments.
She begins by drawing in her sketchbook and then creates paintings and gel-plate prints. Erica is inspired by nature and a love of gardening and green spaces. Her art usually includes a manmade element, such as a bridge or a house. She’s interested in our place in nature and doesn’t want to make a distinction between people and the natural environment.
Erica’s work is colourful and expressive. She loves colourful paints and likes to exaggerate the colours in her paintings. Through each work, she is trying to convey how she was feeling when she created it.
Frances Parkinson creates mixed media works ranging from intimate smaller pieces to large-scale projects, combining intuitive print processes with painting, drawing, and textured surfaces.
A late diagnosis of autism and ADHD was a turning point that brought clarity and focus to Frances’s practice. She learnt to identify how neurodiversity brings barriers to making, so that she could overcome those barriers. Now, her work explores how making can support thinking and wellbeing.
Devon and Cornwall provide inspiration for Frances’s work, which incorporates elements of the landscapes, layered with her own experiences.
Sarah Burt is a printmaker who draws inspiration from the architecture and landscape of her local area, its history and natural beauty. She’s interested in our relationship with our built and natural environments, and the deep connections that we have to certain places. Her prints often feature the places that people may not initially see the beauty in; often invaded by self-seeding plants, yet full of abstract lines and interesting textures. Her prints are detailed and textured – she aims to encourage the viewer to explore the image and build a picture of the history of the place and its story.
Sarah uses drypoint print techniques on old Tetrapak cartons donated by friends and family. She likes being able to use a throw-away item to create something new and at the same time, reduce landfill waste.
Ollie Finn is a craft maker and carpenter working under the name SKWONK. He makes everyday functional objects and small pieces of furniture from recycled skateboards, reclaimed plywood and thoughtfully sourced local timber. An important part of his practice is being mindful of his footprint when bringing new things into the world.
Ollie uses Yosegi – a traditional Japanese marquetry technique where intricate blocks of contrasting woods are glued, repeated, expanded and refined until a geometric patchwork forms. He combines this with contemporary methods to create his distinctive work.
Izzy’s oil paintings explore portraiture, figurative subjects and interior scenes. She gathers inspiration from observing how natural light can flood into a room or stream across surfaces, or how warm light from a lamp creates shades of pink around it.
Izzy has always loved making art, but only recently decided to make a career of it. She began painting seriously during lockdown and is now working from a studio in her garden.
A self-taught quilter and textile artist with a studio in Exeter,Beth creates contemporary quilts inspired by restorative elements of nature. With a background in LandscapeArchitecture and a long-standing love of making, she draws on her understanding of natural rhythms, spatial design,and emotional wellbeing. Her work combines bold, simple aesthetics with deep personal meaning. Under the nameBeth Osment Textiles, she is building a creative business and developing a distinctive practice that bridges function, sustainability, and the quiet beauty of the natural world
Based in Torbay, Jenny Toft’s work explores themes of identity, human connection, and the lasting psychological impact of early relationships. After an early start in artschool was cut short, Jenny returned to education laterin life, completing a BA and MA in Fine Art. Her recent series, The Flesh That Binds Us, marks a powerful shift from abstract seascapes to figurative work rooted in personal experience. She is now establishing her professional practice and developing a distinctive, emotionally resonant visual language
Showing her work at Seale-Hayne, Newton Abbot, Sharon Loddey is a painter and printmaker whose work explores memory, connection, and the emotional weight of everyday objects. Inspired by poetry, song, and personal history, her current series All That We Carry uses a muted palette, collage, and recurring motifs—such as chairs, cups, and tables—to evoke presence, absence, and emotional resonance. Now focusing full-time on her practice, Sharon is building her profile in the local arts community. She aims to expand her printmaking workshops and make art a mindful, accessible experience for others through community engagement and shared creativity.
Kate Rattray is a Teignbridge-based artist making a bold transition from a 30-year career in mosaic to drawing and printmaking. Following a period of reflection and personal loss, she found renewal through walking, sketching, and studying printmaking, as well as embarking on an MAPoetics of Imagination at Dartington Schumacher college.Her new work explores the mythical and sublime qualities of the Dartmoor landscape, using her own handmade inksand papers with materials she forages sustainably from the moor. Working under the name The Dreaming Lark,Kate creates atmospheric prints and drawings that reflect a deepening connection with place, imagination, and nature, marking a powerful new direction in her creative journey
Olivia Parsons is a West Devon-based artist working across drawing and ceramics, exploring themes of play, touch, and audience interaction. A graduate of Camberwell College of Arts (2022), she returned to Devon in 2024 to establish her practice and co-founded an art collective with fellow emerging artists. She creates organically tactile works designed to engage the senses, often inspired by natural forms and environments. With a growing interest in exhibiting collaboratively and in unconventional spaces, Olivia is laying the foundations for a dynamic, community-focused practice rooted in experimentation, accessibility, and connection.
With over twenty years teaching experience, Kat Blockley recently made the decision to focus and prioritise her creative practice. Using stitch, paint, print and song, Kat’s work explores the interface between tradition and modernity in everyday life. Her fascination with social narrative and how the ephemeral and eternal intermingle, led her to catalogue and archive news cuttings, photographs, prints and drawings, which she then uses to inspire new stitch-work pieces, paintings, songs and illustrations under the title A Common Treasury. Her studio is based in Talaton, East Devon.
Having graduated from Aberystwyth University last year
with a First Class degree in Fine Art, Ocativia is keen to
become a professional artist. She is based in East Devon and works primarily with paint and print-making to explore the interconnections between art, science, and nature. Her most recent work focuses on the lichens, mosses and ferns found in the ancient Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor, and invite audiences to look beyond the surface of the landscape, urging them to consider the smaller details that reflect broader environmental changes.
Winner of the 2024 Joanna Radford prize
After completing a Fine Art Painting degree in London
last year, which was experienced mostly online due to Covid restrictions, Willow is now seeking to be a part of
a community of practicing artists. Based in North Devon, Willow works with oil and acrylic, with an occasional appearance of embroidery. She has an interest in exploring patterns found in nature, and creates surrealist scenes using Automatism, art therapy concepts, and Carl Jung theories. Willow will be showing her work during Devon Open Studios at the CREATED 24 event at Abbotsham, hosted by The Big Sheep in Bideford.
Georgi has returned to full time creative practice recently and channelled her energy to focus on ceramics, having a degree in 3D Design specialising in ceramics would seem to make this the obvious choice. Working from a multidisciplinary perspective, the shapes of her tableware take inspiration from contour lines on OS maps. Found objects make their way into and onto some of her functional wares crossing the gap between function and sculpture. She is also showing some ceramic sculptural work in progress using bone china, journals, photographs and projections exploring themes of internal dialogue. You can see her work during Devon Open Studios at Unit L Pottery in Totnes.
Following a recent reassessment of her work-life
balance, Jacqueline made the decision that creativity had to be an integral part of her life again. She began
to explore various mediums, but it was the discovery
of glass that ignited a new creative passion. Jaqueline describes glass as the perfect medium for interpreting colour and light within the landscape, and her work draws inspiration from the diverse beauty of Dartmoor and the Devon coastline. You can see more of her work during Devon Open Studios at Riverside located between Moretonhampstead and Lustleigh.
Featured image: Emerging Artist 2023 Bursary Award winner: Alex Boon. Photograph by Anna Brewster.