Jaguar and the RCA reveal Lyons Award shortlist

The RCA – one of the world’s leading institutions for art and creativity, has a long history of nurturing talent that has gone on to shape culture globally.

The Jaguar Awards are open to students across all RCA multidisciplinary programmes, with 20 selected for their forward-thinking creativity and bold experimentation – an ethos that sits at the forefront of Jaguar’s brand reimagining today, and instilled by its founder, Sir William Lyons who believed that ‘A Jaguar should be a copy of nothing’.

On 1 July, five winners will be announced at the Jaguar Awards. Each will receive a pivotal creative grant to fuel their independent practices, with one exceptional graduate gaining the ultimate distinction – the Lyons Award and £20,000.

The final five will be judged by a panel made up of Jaguar’s creative team, and experts from diverse artistic fields. This includes Gus Casley Hayford, Director of V&A East, recognised for his curatorial leadership and deep expertise in culture, heritage and contemporary artistic discourse; and London-based visual artist, Lakwena Maciver, known for her bold, text-driven murals and immersive public works.

Alongside them, artist, sculptor and 2025 Jaguar Award winner, Jobe Burns, who since completing his MA in Sculpture at the RCA has had work featured in Architectural Digest and was recently named among the finalists for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize 2026. The financial award from Jaguar has been instrumental in enabling him to relocate to a large studio space in the Midlands and to scale his early-career practice.

The 20 shortlisted artworks mirror Jaguar’s refusal to imitate and values of innovation, distinctiveness, and disruption. From painting to sculpture, contemporary art practice to jewellery, ceramics and research programmes, each submission serves as a bold expression of the artist’s point of view - untethered by tradition and driven by authenticity and artistic conviction.

A selection of the shortlisted works will be on display, alongside graduating students’ work, at this year’s Royal College of Art School of Arts and Humanities Show between now and 21 June at its Battersea campus, London.

Jaguar’s transformation is defined by Exuberant Modernism, a creative philosophy that underpins all aspects of the new Jaguar brand world. It embraces bold designs, unexpected and original thinking, creating a brand character that will command attention through fearless creativity.

Meet the 20 shortlisted artists

Amanda Seibæk from Denmark, MA Painting

Amanda’s practice transforms scientific theories into poetic visual worlds, creating a language where painting and print become emotionally charged. In Quantum Dreaming, she draws on speculative physics to explore dreams as portals into parallel realities, with lines mapping shifting pathways through time and dimension. By forging unexpected connections between science, philosophy and emotion, she strikes through traditional boundaries of knowledge and image making to imagine new forms of reality.

Andreas Larsson from Sweden, MA Ceramics & Glass

Andreas creates towering sculptural furniture that merges function with emotional monumentality, using modular totemic forms to explore vulnerability and constructed identity. In An Approximation of Stability, two large scale structures face one another in a psychological dialogue, their hybrid materials include ceramics, bronze and Jaguar-inspired automotive paint, translating surface and colour. Topped with sculptural heads that act as portraits, the work strikes through fixed categories to reveal identity as something continually assembled and renegotiated.

Anna Lugovska from Ukraine, MA Painting

Anna’s paintings explore how memory and rapid social change shape identity, using fragmented scenes, shifting light and ghostly figures to examine presence and visibility. Hands become the primary emotional carriers in her work, revealing vulnerability and individuality amid increasingly digital, disembodied forms of interaction. Blending reality, imagination and illusion, she pauses fleeting moments to question certainty and invite a more intimate encounter with contemporary consciousness.

Anna Pesonen from Finland, MA Sculpture

Anna’s practice embraces fearlessness, creating slow, material-led works that resist the speed and disembodiment of screen-based culture. Her sculptures and installations merge steel, sound and the endangered Karelian vocal tradition kelkettely, forming regenerative encounters that arise from relinquishing control and bringing unlikely disciplines together. Through her PostFuturist methodology, she transforms weathered materials and monumental forms into spaces of presence and renewal, reinterpreting tradition through physicality, time and embodied making.

Caitie J Thomas from UK, MA Painting

Caitlin’s practice explores light as an emotional force, using painting and photography to express resilience, courage and the quiet persistence of hope within darkness. Through movement, gesture and atmospheric abstraction, her work is explored in a variety of mediums. From linen in deep Phthalo blues to paint on reflective metals that amplify colour and shadow. Caitlin creates impressions, allowing light to blur edges and dissolve form. Her works speak to one another as moments of illumination, contrasting darkness with a sense of enduring radiance and call to mind the words of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki: that beauty emerges through shadow.

Christabel Png from Singapore, MA Contemporary Art Practice

Christabel’s practice transforms her background in public sector system design (where she had to focus on the needs of others) into a deeply personal inquiry, using art as a space where selfhood can exist outside institutional roles. Her body of work expresses personal taste but also where she can build worlds for herself to fully inhabit. In A Journey in Motion, fragments of filmed traffic are digitally printed on silk and built into freestanding forms. These become metaphors for divergence and the emotional blur of moving through life while in transition. By dissolving linearity and magnifying moments of departure, she constructs a world where becoming is visible, and where the self is no longer required to disappear into structure.

Elina Yumasheva from UK, MA Painting

Elina’s practice merges environmental science with painting, treating materials as living collaborators and using bacteria-derived pigments, natural dyes and traditional oil techniques to explore matter in states of flux. Her works emerge through interactions between organic and inorganic substances, creating unstable, porous surfaces that reflect post-human ideas of interconnectedness while echoing her own experience of identity shaped within larger cultural forces. Grounded in sustainability and collective action, her material research becomes both an ecological commitment and a visual language of transformation, where boundaries dissolve and forms continually renegotiate themselves.

Eunji Lee from South Korea, MA Jewellery & Metal

Eunji’s practice reveals the hidden fluidity within metal, using etching, raising and flame-induced colour shifts to draw out the material’s innate sense of flow. Guided by her connection to water and her willingness to follow unintended transformations, she allows copper to wrinkle, tear and recombine into forms. Through fragmentation, reassembly and the impermanence of colour, her work transforms metal into a sensory experience where it responds and transforms through its relationship with light, space, time, and its surroundings. Her work moves metal beyond static object-making and toward a spatial and sensory experience.

Heejoo Lee from South Korea, MA Ceramics & Glass

Heejoo’s work visualises how personal histories accumulate within us, using glass mixed with metal oxides to mirror the invisible reactions that shape identity over time. Through a two-stage casting process, blocks of coloured glass melt, shift and entangle, capturing the fluid movement of materials as a metaphor for how experiences, environments and relationships remain active within us. By foregrounding transformation, accumulation and relational change, she creates a space for understanding individuality as something continually formed rather than fixed.

Kwok Lam Tsui from China, MA Painting

Kwok’s paintings explore displacement and diasporic identity through a self-designed mechanical system that carves linear grooves into the surface, turning the canvas into a sculptural structure that holds light, shadow and gesture. Working through subtraction, he removes paint to reveal quiet spaces of tension between presence and absence, while recurring circular forms evoke guidance, belonging and the relational bonds that shape diasporic experience. Installed as families of works rather than isolated pieces, his muted, rhythmic surfaces create contemplative environments where unity, interdependence and the in-between become the ground of meaning.

Laura Perdomo from Colombia, MA Sculpture

Laura’s work explores territory as a social origin, using found objects and raw materials to preserve their inherent form while engaging political, ecological and cultural contexts. In Tundra, Prussian blue flocking, metal and clay construct an impossible, light-responsive landscape that shifts with space and viewer, creating an experience rooted in memory and perception. Functioning as both sculpture and installation, her pieces place the body inside a constantly changing environment, where light, materiality and presence generate a unique encounter every time.

Line Marie Le Fevre from Denmark, MRes RCA

Line’s installation Her, Untold. reimagines female Norse myths through revisionist storytelling. Working across textiles, biomaterials, silicone, concrete, steel and sound, she creates hybrid sculptural forms that sit between craft, research and technology, allowing materials to remain transitional and unfixed. Through makingasinquiry, the work proposes hybridity as a form of agency, challenging institutional narratives and asserting originality through fearless interdisciplinary experimentation.

Paoyu Yang from Taiwan, MA Painting

Paoyu’s paintings translate physical experiences and the Taiwanese climate into sweeping, energetic gestures, drawing on memories of wind, rain, clouds and the vivid force of nature that shaped her early life. Experiencing European landscapes such as the adrenaline of skiing in Chamonix, introduced a new emotional velocity to her, which she channels into brushstrokes that merge drifting clouds, angled rain, plant movement and shifting light into a single atmospheric rhythm. Her works reinterpret landscape through embodied perception, capturing the vitality of the east wind with a wild, bold energy.

Raneece Buddan from Jamaica, MA Sculpture

Raneece’s multidisciplinary practice reflects Afro-Indo Jamaican identity through autoethnographic making, reconstructing lost cultural lineages from Ghana, Nigeria and India into new hybrid forms. Working across textiles, ceramics, wood and indigo, she treats material as a site of reconnection, from 3D printed ceramic vessels that unravel and reform identity to painted matriarchal figures discovered within the grain of wood. Her installation Memory as a Site of Reconnection rebuilds “home” through traditional and experimental craft, creating a contemporary visual language that honours ancestry while embracing the fluid, ever-evolving nature of diasporic belonging.

Ricardo Mondragon from Mexico, MA Sculpture

Ricardo’s practice investigates how vibration and harmonic systems generate structure, translating oscillatory behaviour into sculpture and installation through computational modelling and material experimentation. His works stabilise resonance, interference and standing wave patterns into physical form, creating objects that hover between organic emergence and mathematical order. Undulations extends this inquiry by carving Hooke’s wave observations into alabaster, holding movement in stone while revealing the material’s internal luminosity.

Vedika Rampal from India (now living in Australia), MA Sculpture

Vedika’s interdisciplinary practice excavates archives, sites and artefacts to question how histories are framed, using acrylic and gilding metal to expose the instability of perception and the systems that shape it. In Tyger Tyger Burning Bright, Vedika removes the hunters, attendants and tiger from historical hunting photographs, leaving behind only the landscapes and residual traces. These fragments are reassembled into suspended metal image forms that invite viewers to imagine how the scene might appear from an animal’s perspective. Viewing this through absence, inversion, repetition and the use of negative space.

Wenjie Feng from China (now living in USA), MA Contemporary Art Practice

Wenjie’s year-long series The Turning uses natural dyes on silk to mark time through daily repetition, allowing colour, material and seasonality to accumulate into a quiet record of inner and outer change. Working intuitively with plant-based pigments that drip, fade and transform, the process becomes both a collaboration with nature and a ritual of healing shaped by Taoist ideas of harmony and the 24 Solar Terms. The resulting works invite a slower, contemplative experience, foregrounding presence, impermanence and the emotional power of colour.

Lingyi Zhang from China, MA Contemporary Art Practice

Lingyi’s multidisciplinary practice spans photography, experimental animation, film, installation and theatre. White Bear: Dream 02 builds a techno-organic domestic world where AI-generated interiors loop endlessly, dissolving boundaries between body, architecture and system; using restrictive models like Gemini and Kling to expose their tendency toward smooth, standardised “perfection,” the work adopts a Dreamcore, first person visual language to explore domestication, perception and control, creating a hybrid environment where synthetic materials, shifting sightlines and recursive movement reveal how technological systems shape contemporary experience.

Yi-Chun (Josh) Wang and Jui-Chieh Wu from Taiwan, MA Ceramics & Glass and MA Photography

Fields of Residue is a collaborative project in which YiChun Wang and Jui-Chieh Wu explore how bodies negotiate space, objects and one another through movement, touch and unstable moments of contact. Two blown glass forms shaped by gravity, heat and collapse act as relational surfaces, inviting balance, resistance and temporary alignment. Closeup images of skin against glass and long exposure traces of motion blur the boundary between body and object, compressing duration into luminous behavioural drawings.

Yuze Pan from China, MA Jewellery & Metal

Polyphony is a brooch built from repeated aluminium units whose shifting colours appear and disappear as the viewer moves, creating a structure that holds multiple visual possibilities at once. Each fragment maintains its own position while contributing to a shared form, reflecting Yuze’s interest in coexistence as a state where different voices remain distinct and also connected. Activated by the wearer’s movement, the brooch resists any single fixed reading, proposing coexistence as a dynamic, ever-changing relationship shaped through colour, repetition and perspective.