Vice-Chancellor's Postgraduate Art Prize celebrates six outstanding postgraduate artists

From sculpture and installation to moving image, sound and photography, this year's Vice-Chancellor's Postgraduate Art Prize celebrates six artists whose work reflects the originality, ambition and critical enquiry that define postgraduate study at Goldsmiths.

Selected from this year's postgraduate degree shows, the winning works explore ecology, migration, memory, material transformation and the relationships between people, place and environment, demonstrating the breadth of contemporary artistic practice emerging from Goldsmiths' postgraduate community.

"These artists represent the extraordinary breadth of postgraduate practice at Goldsmiths. Their work spans different disciplines, materials and perspectives, but they share a commitment to asking important questions, challenging conventions and exploring new ways of understanding the world through creative practice."

MFA Fine Art

Roland Knowlden Jr.

Roland Knowlden Jr. receives the Vice-Chancellor's Postgraduate Art Prize for a multidisciplinary practice that explores the unknown, absence and chaos through painting, sculpture, film and assemblage.

A Liberian-American artist based in London, Knowlden brings together collage and assemblage across a range of media, creating works that destabilise familiar materials and challenge fixed ideas of place, memory and identity. Through layered surfaces and sculptural forms, his practice examines the tension between systems of order and control and spaces of uncertainty and transformation.

Anna Siow Usadi

Anna Siow Usadi receives the Vice-Chancellor's Postgraduate Art Prize for work that explores ecological relationships and the interconnectedness of human and more-than-human worlds.

Working across sculpture, installation and living materials, her practice invites viewers to reconsider ideas of care, reciprocity and coexistence. Incorporating live algae into her installation, the work becomes part of the ecological systems it explores, encouraging audiences to reflect on the dynamic relationships between people, organisms and the environments they share

Xinyi Miao

Xinyi Miao receives the Vice-Chancellor's Postgraduate Art Prize for Chorus of Distraction, an installation that transforms everyday moments of interrupted attention into a rich sensory experience.

Bringing together everyday sounds and written fragments collected from moments of interrupted attention, the work challenges the idea that distraction represents failure, instead proposing it as another way of sensing, recording and moving through the world. Through listening and observation, Miao encourages audiences to reconsider the value of the overlooked moments that shape everyday experience.

Graduate Diploma in Art

Edith Marlowe Geenty

Edith Marlowe Geenty creates sculptural works inspired by London's historic cemeteries, roadside memorials and the visual language of everyday urban life.

Drawing on Victorian funerary traditions alongside contemporary forms of remembrance, this prize-winning installation transforms familiar materials into richly textured sculptures that explore memory, grief and community. Informed by their experiences of London's queer nightlife and sex work, the work considers embodied experience while balancing solemnity with moments of play.

MA Art & Ecology

Kerttuli Uusimies

Kerttuli Uusimies explores how materials and bodies mirror and respond to one another through sculpture, sound and installation.

Her prize-winning work centres on clay's capacity to be endlessly recycled while unfired. Amplifying the sound of dry clay dissolving into water, the installation follows one stage of the material's life cycle and invites viewers to consider transformation, memory and renewal.

As the work asks: Is recycling a reset, or does something persist beyond the sludge?

MA Artists' Film & Moving Image

Aisosa Edokpayi

Aisosa Edokpayi receives the Vice-Chancellor's Postgraduate Art Prize for Testimony, a single-channel video installation exploring memory, migration and family history.

Drawing on photographs taken in Benin City, Madrid and New York, alongside an archival recording of his father reflecting on his journey from Benin City to Europe and the United States, Testimony traces the memories of his father's dream to leave home in search of new possibilities. The installation is accompanied by Benin Report, a photobook bringing together images Edokpayi has made in Benin City over the past five years.

Working across film, photography, installation and sculpture, Edokpayi's wider practice explores experiences of time, Black physicality, and the traces people leave behind through memory, presence and absence.

About the prize

The Vice-Chancellor's Postgraduate Art Prize is awarded annually to recognise outstanding creative achievement across Goldsmiths' postgraduate degree shows.

Together, this year's winners reflect the breadth of postgraduate practice at the University, demonstrating how artists working across different disciplines and media are using creative practice to ask important questions, challenge conventions and imagine new ways of understanding the world.