“FYS Art Prize - 2025”

GROUP ART EXHIBITION AND ART PRIZE 2025

”Showing your artwork in an art gallery is a key step to advancing your artist career and to gaining the recognition you deserve.”

Thank you to everyone who have applied for the FYS Art Prize 2025! Eight artists have been selected to collaborate with Fox Yard Studio and to participate in our Art Prize group exhibition: Wendy Quinnell, Jonathan Lei, Catrin O'Hara, Tracy Tilmouth, Polly Black, Luyin Cao, Yuyue He, and Elizabeth Ardley-Walker.

ABOUT

Wendy Quinnell

A contemporary British artist working with mixed media and oils. Wendy’s design background and life events influences her work. Her art is constantly evolving, experimenting with various effects that evoke emotions and bring back memories, with an interest in human connections and physical body shapes, exploring a wide range of issues with a distorted sense of realism. She paints using texture and colour, working with oils, mixed media on different surfaces, with a sense of “about” rather than “of”. Wendy has exhibited at the Mall Galleries London, in the ING Discerning Eye 2024, The Espacio Gallery London and has also exhibited in Cambridge, Sleaford, Ely, Wisbech and Stamford. She exhibits annually as part of Peterborough Artists Open Studios.

Wendy works from her studio in Lincolnshire. She has studied with award winning artist, Martin Kinnear, exploring classical and modern oil painting, referencing painters throughout history to discover how they created their work. Wendy has appeared on Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year tv programme and is a member of The Deepford Artists and Lincolnshire Artists Society.

Jonathan Lei

Jonathan Lei, a 24-year-old Chinese photography artist currently based in the UK. His work excels in capturing the nuanced emotions embedded within everyday scenes and portraying diverse natural landscapes encountered during his travels. Through his exploration of various cities and regions, Jonathan employs his keen observational skills and sensitive emotional expression to highlight moments and scenes that are often overlooked in today's fast-paced lifestyle. He asserts that photography transcends mere information presentation; it serves as a medium to evoke profound emotions in the audience, transforming them into cherished memories.

Catrin O'Hara

Since a diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder in 2019, art has been a way for Catrin to reconnect—with nature, with creativity, and with a sense of purpose. Her artworks reflect growth, change, and renewal, in nature and in life.

Catrin is inspired by botanical forms in many stages, seed-heads, berries, leaves, flowers, and capturing the resilient life-force she sees in them. Her work also shows a journey through dark times of mental illness, and the struggles to learn a new way of communicating, to a more tranquil place with some balance and light. Running through everything is a tension between polish and roughness, mastery and lack of control, cycles of fading and blooming.

Tracy Tilmouth

Tracy is a lifelong Londoner now living and working in Ely. Moving out of the big city has given her the space and time to persue the art she always wanted to create. Abstract expressionism has always appealed to her after a work life of order and control. She likes to create paintings that are spontaneous, with gestural brushstrokes and subconscious mark-making, allowing the viewer to react to the colours and forms without being distracted by recognizable imagery. She uses various mediums in her work, including acrylic paint, collage, oil pastels, pencil, gel pens, and various mark-making tools. All supply their own interesting aspects to the work, drawing the viewer closer to discover new things in the piece.

Polly Black

Polly Black’s mixed-media practice engages with themes of body image, (m)otherhood, and overlooked experiences; combining personal narratives with materials that intuitively serve the concept. Black’s current interests centre on the testing period of midlife from a (cis-gendered) female perspective. Often exaggeratedly misrepresented in Western culture as hags, crones, or rendered simply invisible, older women frequently find themselves culturally marginalised.

Luyin Cao

Iuyin was born in a mountain city in Fujian—neither fully urban nor truly rural. Growing up, she never deeply considered what “home” meant to her. It wasn’t until she moved to the UK that she began to look back. Confronted by unfamiliar landscapes and cultural settings, she found herself gazing homeward—not with nostalgia, but with a need to reconstruct, to locate new visual and emotional coordinates.

Yuyue He

Yuyue He is a London-based artist working across moving image, painting, and installation. Her practice explores identity, collective memory, and the politics of visibility, often through the emotional resonance of overlooked materials and domestic objects.

She engages with the tension between personal experience and public discourse, developing a fragmented visual language rooted in diaporic narratives, spatial memory, and symbolic material culture. Yuyue received her MFA in Fine Art and her BFA in illustration from the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been shown at Queer East Festival, The One Minutes Foundation, RBSA Gallery, XYZ Gallery, Barbican Arts Group Trust, ASC Gallery, among others.

Elizabeth Ardley-Walker

Elizabeth Ardley-Walker graduated from University of Portsmouth in 2019 with a BA (HONS) in Graphic Design. Originally from Sutton, Surrey, she moved up to Suffolk in 2012 at the age of 14. She likes to take her camera out whenever she travels either abroad or in this country to capture pictures of interesting buildings to illustrate in her artwork. My illustrations are digitally drawn using Procreate on her iPad and using her photographs as references. Her love for drawing and painting was developed with the help of her neighbour and local artist who gave her art lessons when she first moved to Suffolk.