Jaguar Is Helping Emerging Artists Take A Leap
Inside the V&A East Storehouse, it was easy to lose yourself among the towering displays of archived objects. Nearly 5,000 years of human creativity filled the space. Against that backdrop, a new generation of artists was imagining what their own future might hold. For the second year, Jaguar, in collaboration with the Royal College of Art, celebrated that spirit of emerging creativity through The Jaguar Awards. The awards focused on artists at the beginning of their careers, offering practical support by way of a financial bursary amount to develop their practice at a stage when funding and visibility can make a tangible difference.
That spirit ran through the entire evening. Charlene Prempeh hosted the ceremony as artists, curators and designers gathered inside the V&A East Storehouse Collections Hall. One outstanding artist received the £20,000 Lyon's Award named after Jaguar founder Sir William Lyons, alongside a £10,000 Future Originals Award and three Special Commendations of £5,000 each.
The top prize went to jewellery and metalwork artist Yuze Pan for Polyphony. The work is built from repeated aluminium units that shift in appearance as the viewer moves around them. Colour seems to surface and disappear across the surface depending on angle and proximity. The piece resists a single reading. It explores identity and coexistence through movement rather than fixed form, where perception becomes part of the work itself.
The Future Originals Award went to painter Kwok Lam Tsui, whose practice uses carved and removed paint to examine displacement and diasporic identity. His surfaces are built through subtraction rather than addition, turning the canvas into something closer to a relief structure. Light collects in the grooves, shifting attention between presence and absence.
Three Special Commendations were awarded to Vedika Rampal, Anna Pesonen and Line Marie Le Fèvre. Rampal’s work reworks colonial hunting archives by removing central figures and leaving fragmented landscapes that shift meaning through absence. Pesonen’s practice brings together steel, sound and the endangered Karelian vocal tradition kelkettely, forming installations that move between material weight and sonic memory. Le Fèvre works across textiles, biomaterials and industrial materials to reconstruct female figures from Norse mythology through a process that blends research and fabrication, keeping forms deliberately unstable.
Sculptor Jobe Burns, last year’s inaugural Jaguar Award winner, was also present at the ceremony. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art, his practice has expanded quickly, and he has realised his ambition of establishing his own studio. But he was clear that the most significant impact of the award has been far less visible than institutional recognition.
“The biggest thing has been the kind of support that it gave me to be able to move my practice back to the Midlands,” he explained, describing how the funding allowed him to reconfigure both his life and working conditions. “So really using the money and the infrastructure to be able to build a studio of mine.”
That shift was as practical as it was creative. The award enabled him to establish a permanent base, invest in equipment, and reduce the ongoing costs that often weigh on early-career artists. “I was able to buy a machine and a bit of a space and a van so I could move my artworks without having to hire,” he said. “So the practical side of it has been massively impactful in terms of getting a good infrastructure with the practice.”
For Burns, this kind of support operates less as symbolic recognition and more as a material foundation for sustaining work. The result, he suggested, is not only increased stability but a reframing of what it means to actually develop a practice over time.
He also spoke about originality not as a sudden moment of arrival, but something closer to repetition and endurance. “I would say the thing that makes what you do original is the amount you're able to repeat it over and over again,” he said. “It’s sheer hours, sheer commitment, sheer just showing up every day, keep doing it and eventually you land on something that feels like yours.”
Looking outward, Burns also reflected on the structural role awards like the Lyons Awards play for emerging artists navigating early career uncertainty. “Everyone’s always looking for a sense of validation. It's like a battery in the back to keep going,” he said. “The awards financially help keep us going. They give you a sense of freedom to not have to worry about commercialising your practice in a way that might help you make work that is free.”
For him, that freedom is the crucial point: not separation from the market entirely, but enough space to develop work before it becomes shaped by immediate economic pressure. “It seems like everyone is saying the same thing,” he added. “How can we make this survive?”
