Ikuko Iwamoto is best known for her sculptural often eccentric porcelain table top pieces, however she has developed a new body of work exploring framed wall sculptures since 2012.

Her typical work involves using a slip-casting technique, which process includes plaster model and mould making, to create a hollow body, and ornamental parts, such as spikes, piled-up dots are attached to create tension, fragility and flows.

Montserrat is totally convinced that ceramics is the noblest, traditional and humanly attached material of all. Also, historically, what this material has allowed us, the humanity, to achieve, in all aspects, from improving our health to a medium of expression, is immense. This makes him feel real veneration and respect to it. He shows a very particular interest for the highly technically demanding oriental glazes from the Old Masters, having inspired him to make an extensive research, giving the strong finish to Montserrat’s work. Glazes are his passion. He is fascinated to see and endlessly test what the chemical elements around us bring to the surface of the vessels that he throws on the wheel.

£1,000 Awarded Albert Montserrat, Sponsored by Dr Virginie Lerouge Knight

Montserrat is totally convinced that ceramics is the noblest, traditional and humanly attached material of all. Also, historically, what this material has allowed us, the humanity, to achieve, in all aspects, from improving our health to a medium of expression, is immense. This makes him feel real veneration and respect to it. He shows a very particular interest for the highly technically demanding oriental glazes from the Old Masters, having inspired him to make an extensive research, giving the strong finish to Montserrat’s work. Glazes are his passion. He is fascinated to see and endlessly test what the chemical elements around us bring to the surface of the vessels that he throws on the wheel.

Catalina Vial will create a 3-dimensional glass or porcelain art piece for the Curio space of SoShiro.

Catalina Vial’s work is an ode to this mestizo woman, who from the earth is able to start over and over again, raising villages, houses and children without looking back, without forgetting who she is and regardless of who she was. By joining and composing different pieces of porcelain, paper clay and stoneware, Vial represents the courage, beauty and dignity of women in the act of destroying and rebuilding themselves infinitely. The organic circular, oval and container forms of her works embody the feminine energy in movement, the ability to contain and be a fundamental part of the cycle of life and death.

Vial began her artistic career in the world of engraving and book binding, two disciplines that greatly influence her current work as a ceramist aesthetically and in the way she assembles her pieces.

In our modern era of digital media, there are endless possibilities for producing imagery of any kind. Maddy, meticulously cutting and pasting, is indifferent to all that. As a child, colouring books full of characters caught still in motion were a retreat from the outside world to an inner sanctuary of unfettered imagination where play, adventure, and the joyful act of colouring and mark making were intertwined. As an artist, this place inspires him to delve deeper, deconstructing and transforming the material into the creation of new work, equally exuberant and uniquely contemporary. In doing so, he humbly embraces previous generations of Masters inserting and challenging contemporary art of their time with the cutting edge of paper.

£500 Awarded to Keith Maddy, sponsored by Brownhill Insurance Group

Kgole’s works are an exposition of the interplay between the identities of people living in rural Limpopo and the world which they inhabit. The artist grew up in a Limpopo village,South Africa and tells vivid human stories about the experiences of people who live there.They are stories that are untold to an urban audience, to whom rural South Africa is a hidden landscape. They tell tales of struggle, of abandonment, of promises broken and dreams deferred. They speak of resilience in the face of everyday injustice, of resistance through the simple act of living. Kgole’s work is typified by his use of Anaglyphs, whereby two versions of his composite photographic images are printed in different colours (typically blue and red) onto canvas.

£200 Awarded to Giggs Kgole, sponsored by Brownhill Insurance Group