Meet The 2026 Jaguar Award Winners

For emerging artists, the early stages of a career are often defined by a period of exploration: testing ideas, developing a visual language and finding ways to bring ambitious projects into the world. The five recipients of The Jaguar Awards represent a generation of artists working across sculpture, jewellery, painting, sound and installation, each using their practice to question how we understand identity, history, memory and the materials around us.

We spoke directly with each of them about the ideas driving their work—from reimagining overlooked mythological figures to exploring displacement, cultural memory and new relationships between humans, objects and environments. Through their responses, each artist offers insight into the research, experimentation and personal experiences that shape their creative processes.

Yuze Pan—Polyphony

Winner of The Jaguar Awards 2026

Yuze Pan’s Polyphony explores coexistence through jewellery, using repeated aluminium units that shift in colour and appearance as the viewer moves around the work. For Pan, the title reflects the idea of multiple voices existing together without needing to merge into one.

“Receiving this award is a significant recognition of my work,” Pan explains. “At this stage of my artistic journey, it has given me the confidence to continue exploring my field and to place my practice within a broader context.”

This concept of coexistence directly shapes Pan’s approach to material and form. The work uses cold connections to bring individual components together, allowing them to create a shared structure while maintaining their distinct identities. Anodised aluminium was chosen for its range of colours, as well as its lightness and stability, allowing greater freedom for experimentation.

A central element of Polyphony is that it cannot be fully understood from a single viewpoint. As the viewer changes position, new colours and compositions appear. Pan sees this shifting perspective as a way of showing that objects, like people, cannot be reduced to one fixed interpretation.

“Jewellery naturally creates a space between the wearer and the viewer,” Pan says. “The wearer becomes part of the work, contributing their own identity, movement and presence to how it is perceived.”

For Pan, The Jaguar Awards have provided both recognition and a wider platform. Meeting fellow artists, gallery directors, and art patrons  at the ceremony created opportunities for exchange, introducing him to new audiences and creative validation. Moving forward, Pan hopes to continue exploring different materials, scales and collaborations across disciplines.

Kwok Lam Tsui—Painting, Displacement and Belonging

Kwok Lam Tsui’s painting practice explores displacement, belonging and the immigrant experience through carefully constructed monochromatic surfaces. His works uses light, shadow and subtraction to create spaces between cultures, identities and memories.

“My practice is deeply rooted in my diasporic experience of loss, grief, and family separation shaped by immigration,” Tsui explains. “Through monochromatic surfaces, light, and shadow, I create in-between worlds that explore memory, absence, spirituality, and belonging.”

Tsui developed a mechanical system to create structured, linear textures within his paintings. Inspired by his Eastern cultural heritage, the process slows down the act of painting and allows the making itself to become part of the meaning behind the work. The repetitive construction of each surface becomes a meditative process, carrying ideas of time, labour and emotional experience.

The relationship between presence and absence is central to Tsui’s practice. Through layers of paint, traces of previous versions remain visible, allowing what has been removed or concealed to continue existing within the work.

“I am interested in using shadow as an in-between space in my paintings,” he says, reflecting his own experience of living between cultures and identities.

Tsui also sees curation as essential to how his work is experienced. He describes his paintings as a family that exists together, communicating with one another while sharing fragments of his emotions and experiences. At the same time, he wants audiences to encounter the work openly, without being directed towards a single interpretation.

Through The Jaguar Awards, Tsui says the greatest impact has been visibility and confidence opening up future possibilities. Showcasing his graduating work at the V&A East Storehouse to a large audience of creative industry professionals helped strengthen his presentation skills and gave him reassurance that the questions at the centre of his practice are conversations worth continuing.

Vedika Rampal—Tyger Tyger Burning Bright

Vedika Rampal’s work examines archives, colonial histories and the ways narratives are constructed and inherited. Her practice begins at the intersection between memory, lived experience and official histories.

“As part of a diaspora, both connected and yet physically separated from your culture, its objects, its narratives and its histories, the dual acts of storytelling and memory become essential,” Rampal explains.

Her research into South Asian artefacts held within British collections explores the tensions between archival records and personal or cultural memory. She is interested in how museums and colonial documents construct narratives, and how those narratives can be questioned through contemporary practice.

Rampal describes the archive as something aware of its own construction, containing contradictions and gaps where alternative interpretations can emerge. Her installations explore these fissures, combining archival material with her own perspective rather than presenting history as a fixed timeline.

Perception is central to this process. Through acrylic screens, filters and controlled viewpoints, Rampal challenges the idea that audiences can access a complete or objective understanding of history. Instead, viewers encounter fragments, shifting perspectives and partial views.

“I want to make the ‘God’s-eye view’ or the ‘bird’s-eye view’ impossible,” she says. “In my installations you cannot see everything all at once, only in fragments.”

Rampal describes her practice as post-disciplinary, moving beyond traditional boundaries between sculpture, photography and image-making. For her, this allows different histories and forms of knowledge to exist together.

Anna Pesonen—Bound in the Spiral Dance / Post-Futurism Works

Anna Pesonen’s practice explores ruins, regeneration and alternative futures through sculpture, sound and material experimentation. Her approach, described as “Post-Futurism”, questions the systems humans create and the conditions they produce.

“I find myself returning to the same question: why do we keep building systems that diminish our capacity to live well together?” Pesonen says.

Working from uncertainty is central to her process. Rather than beginning with fixed answers, she allows research, collaboration and materials themselves to reshape the direction of the work. Her materials are chosen because they already carry histories and connections to the conditions she investigates.

Before moving into fine art, Pesonen spent a decade working in luxury fashion. That experience continues to influence her understanding of images, culture and material. However, she ultimately wanted the freedom to ask questions rather than create within commercial structures.

Her work often brings together fields that rarely meet, including sculpture, sound, philosophy, archaeology and ethnomusicology. Her collaboration with the endangered Karelian vocal tradition kelkettely is not about preserving it as an archive, but engaging with it as a living practice and questioning why traditions become endangered.

Line Marie Le Fèvre—Her, Untold.

Line Marie Le Fèvre’s installation Her, Untold. reimagines female figures from Norse mythology through a process of revision and reconstruction. Growing up in Denmark surrounded by Norse stories and Viking history, Le Fèvre was familiar with these narratives, but felt disconnected from the limited roles given to their female characters.

“When I started investigating these stories through my research at the Royal College of Art, I thought I knew them well—and then found the female characters barely had a voice of their own,” she explains.

Rather than rewriting these myths, Le Fèvre aims to reveal their complexity and return a sense of multiplicity to figures that have often been simplified. Her sculptures embrace instability, reflecting the shapeshifting qualities of the characters themselves.

For Le Fèvre, shapeshifting is not only a mythological idea but a way of working. Her practice remains open and unfinished, allowing materials and research to guide the outcome.

This approach is reflected in her use of contrasting materials. Concrete and steel represent rigid structures of definition and control, while biopolymers and natural fibres introduce softness, change and uncertainty. Their interaction creates tension between strength and vulnerability.

“I’m not interested in materials that behave,” she says. “I’m interested in what happens when they don’t, when they push back against each other and something unexpected emerges.”

“The platform opens doors into spaces and communities where the work can find its people,” Le Fèvre says. “Jaguar’s recognition puts my sculptural installation into that conversation in a way I could not have engineered.”