Hesketh Hubbard Bursaries 2026 | Winners Announced
/ Hesketh Hubbard Art Society
Announcing the winners of the Hesketh Hubbard Bursaries 2026...
Hesketh Hubbard Bursaries | Winners
Annually, the Hesketh Hubbard Art Society (London's largest life drawing group) offers three bursaries to young artists aged between 18 and 30. Created to address a shortage of life drawing opportunities available to young artists, the bursaries provide an opportunity for recipients to progress their craft in line with the goals of their individual practice, experiment and join the Hesketh Hubbard community.
Each winner receives a free year-long membership to the Society starting in January 2026. The standard of applications this year was remarkable and we are grateful to each artist who took the time to introduce us to their practice.
We are delighted to announce this year’s winners:
Harrison Armstrong
'Being enrolled into a life drawing group is the best thing I could hope to have access to for my development. I want to become more fluent in understanding the figure...This will then give me more confidence in depicting figures within my compositions.'
Harrison is a graduate of Edinburgh College of Art and was selected for the Royal Scottish Academy New Contemporaries exhibition in 2022. Translated from drawings and doodles, Harrison's paintings often depict figures in settings that borrow from the aesthetics of stage sets, cartoons and film, to explore ideas of control and narrative ambiguity. Harrison utilises a recurrent, tonal palette of grey, brown and black that is punctuated by a vivid red, used to render the sheen of rubber boots or the knotted ties of a rope.
Varshga Premarasa
'Earlier this year, I visited Sri Lanka, where I drew family members from life, which showed me a new way of seeing and understanding the human form and the importance of consistent life drawing practice...'
Varshga is a graduate of Middlesex University and was selected for the New Contemporaries in 2024. Her practice involves reimagining moments from her family history, in a complex exploration of lineage, recognition and absence. Storytelling, with a particular focus on memories of life and death, are central to her paintings, which utilise a collage-like approach to composition and a palette of saturated, bold colour.
Ella Trott
'I often find myself omitting specific figurative features that I find difficult, be that hands or faces, and the ability to develop these traditional skills with the Hesketh Hubbard society would be invaluable for my career.'
Ella Trott is a graduate of Central Saint Martins and a current participant in the artist incubator programme Crème Fraîche. Ella’s oil paintings are developed from photographs in her family archives to become records of distant memories. Utilising a distinct painting process of underpainting and removal, Ella also draws reference from the visual languages of photography and pop culture, to conjure a sense of longing for times passed.
Shortlist for the Hesketh Hubbard Bursaries 2026
Oluwasemilore Delano
Oluwasemilore is an artist working between Lagos and London. Her practice continually returns to the question of what it means to paint the figure — the body — not just as form, but as a site of perception.
Shiv Lalgi
Drawing from personal and collective histories, Shiv centralises the labouring body as a site of storytelling to explore the layered terrains of identity and the role of the quiet, often invisible process of survival, adaptation and becoming.
Lotta Lindsay
Lotta Lindsay is currently a student at Central Saint Martins. Her practice makes use of innovative approaches to digital collage and image manipulation in order to produce reference material that is transformed, through paint, into dreamlike compositions.