WRITE ON ART 2025 WINNERS
WRITE ON ART 2025 WINNERS
Write on Art is a national writing programme, delivered by the Paul Mellon Centre and Art UK, that invites young people (14-19 years old) to explore sharing their creative and critical responses to art through writing. Young writers are invited to write 400-600 words about an artwork of their choice from Art UK’s website for one of three categories:
• Creative writing – an imaginative and expressive response to an artwork
• Review – a critical commentary about an artwork or installation
• Essay – a critical analysis of an artwork supported by research
For the 2025 round of the programme we received over 150 submissions from young people across the UK. We were hugely impressed by the creativity, passion and unique points of view this year’s applicants brought to their chosen artworks.
This year’s judge, Jeremy Millar, Head of Programme for the Royal College of Art (RCA)’s Writing MA, selected twelve writers to attend a Young Art Writers Workshop at the RCA in September 2025. At this workshop these young writers had the opportunity to further explore art writing and selfpublishing, providing them with valuable insights into ways to continue their writing journeys and share their work in future. This zine features the pieces submitted for the competition by these twelve writers and posters they created to promote them at the Young Art Writers Workshop. We hope you enjoy reading their work.
Thanks to
This year’s winners: Arthur Lam, Asima Mansuri, Clara Fischelis, Emir Icoz, Evie Murray, Ginevra De Angeli, Grace Vyvan, Mabli Jones, Madison Gazard, Ruby Smith, Yuxi Cai and Zachary Baum
This year’s judge: Jeremy Millar
The RCA’s print technicians: Alba Ceide Rodriguez, Claudia Espart Hernández and Nerys Edwards
Staff across the Paul Mellon Centre and Art UK: Andy Ellis, Esme Boggis, Florence Smith, Maggie Hills, Rachel Prosser, Sarah Turner and Tina Corri
Write on Art runs on an annual basis and more information can be found about the programme here: www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/learning/about-write-on-art
ARTHUR LAM
Writers aged 14-16, Review category, Write on Art 2025
Holey Island (from the series ‘Just Imagine’), Stephen W. MacPhail (1990)
Stephen W. MacPhail’s ‘Holey Island’ is a surreal, pastel toned fantasy that walks a strange line between childhood nostalgia and quiet absurdity. Part of his ‘Just Imagine’ series, this piece initially appears to be a cheerful landscape though soon shifts course to reveal something more obscure and peculiar than expected. The name hints at the whimsical paradox within it: ‘Holey’ not just in the literal rock-formed sense, but also suggesting a space defined by absence, emptiness and questions.
The piece centralises on a coral-pink and lemoncoloured rock, which dominates the scene like a stage set. Its hollow spaces lead the eye into its interior but they’re filled with mystery rather than clarity. Around it, the island scatters with odd details: in the foreground, two peach toned lizards, white horses standing aloof on a cliff, and in the background a ghostly ship adrift in a sea too calm to feel real. All of this is bordered with a patterned frame, giving the piece a tapestry and theatrical backdrop.
What makes ‘Holey Island’ compelling is MacPhail’s layering of elements in disjointed harmony. He doesn’t offer a clear narrative but rather presents a landscape as if from a dream, or a children’s fantasy book, yet underscored by irony. A tiny, fenced settlement in the lower left corner appears insignificant next to the splendour of the surreal natural forms. The structure inside resembles an outpost, possibly a tongue-in-cheek reference to the empire. The ship suggests travel or escape, but is entirely still.
This disillusionment gives the sense of a world once inhabited and controlled, now drifting in dreamlike logic. It could be a commentary on isolation, the collapse of empire, or the futility of control; but nothing is spelled out.º
MacPhail’s use of acrylic allows him to explore potentially critical ideas about civilisation, fantasy, and retreat; all deliberately with a naïve drawing style that emphasises nothing jarring or violent. In doing so, it encourages us to stop trying to make rational sense of it all and instead, rather wander through its absurd beauty.
Displayed in Leighton Buzzard Library, this piece functions as a secret portal into personal fantasy. There is no didactic plaque nor heavy handed explanation nearby, which feels appropriate. ‘Holey Island’ thrives on quiet confusion and open-ended interpretation. MacPhail has succeeded in crafting a piece that doesn’t just encourage imagination, but makes it feel like the only sensible response.
ASIMA MANSURI
Writers aged 14-16, Creative Writing category, Write on Art 2025
Study for Siegfried, Christopher Le Brun (1993)
I wake to stillness.
The air is thick, quiet, golden-grey. The sky above me flickers like a brush paused mid-stroke. The ground is soft—not soil, but canvas, painted dark and uneven. Each step I take leaves no mark. There is no wind. No birds. No breath. Only me.
My body is strong, but strange. My hands blur at the edges. I have weight but no warmth. I feel… suspended. Real and not real. Alive, but not whole.
Then I understand: I am not flesh. I am oil.
I am a painting.
A study.
The word hits me like a blow. I was never finished— only started. The artist began me, then left. I don’t know why. Maybe he changed his mind. Maybe he didn’t know how to end me.
But he gave me a name. Siegfried.
A name full of fire and story. Of dragons, swords, and songs.
But I’ve seen no dragons. Heard no music. Felt no flame.
So what am I?
I walk, heart pounding with something close to frustration. I was meant to be more than this— more than a blur in a half-made world. The trees ahead stretch like questions, dark and uncertain. I move toward them, pulled by something I can’t name.
Then, I hear it.
A low hum. Soft and steady, like the whisper of something ancient waiting to be remembered. My feet quicken. The sound leads me through the trees, deeper into the grey.
But when I arrive—there is nothing. Just paint and silence. The hum is gone. The stillness returns.
I sink to the ground, hollow. My sword—if I ever had one—is missing. My destiny, if it existed, remains unfinished. All I know is this aching pause I live inside. Not a beginning. Not an end.
I stare at my hands. They don’t feel like mine. They belong to a version of me that never arrived. I want to be more. I want the fire, the battle, the story. I want to feel real.
But for now, I wait.
I wait for the hand to return. For the brush to rise. For the final stroke that will give me shape. Voice. Purpose.
Until then, I am only a question.
Unanswered.
CLARA FISCHELIS
Writers aged 17-19, Essay category, Write on Art 2025
Girl with a Kitten, Lucian Freud (1947)
A girl with a kitten. How delightful, you might think. Perhaps it’s a painting in the Rococo tradition of Jean-Baptiste Perronneau where an exquisite child, draped in blue silk and lace, clutches a beautiful fluffy cat. Or maybe it’s more akin to his Baroque British counterpart, Joseph Wright of Derby, whose double portrait of two girls dressing a tiny kitten by candlelight evokes childlike joy, and playfulness.
But one should know never to expect anything so straightforward or saccharine when it comes to the work of Lucian Freud.
Freud’s Girl with a Kitten (1947) is a portrait that upends our expectations. We see 21-yearold Kitty Garman (Freud’s girlfriend), pictured against a flat, dull background of brownish-grey. She wears a shirt in palest blue; her brown hair harshly side-parted and slicked to her head. In her right hand - clenched rigidly below her chest - she clutches a tabby kitten.
In this muted setting, Kitty sits front-on, but with her face turned rigidly away from us. There is something deliberately ‘off’ about her presentation - the squashed yet stretched proportions of her head, the too-wide eyes, the lopsided line of her haircut. The overall effect is subtly disquieting.
Freud was known as much for his forensic, clinical precision as for the psychological revelation of his portraiture. There is no attempt to flatter or idealise. His style resembles an autopsy of appearance more than a celebration of it. Here, Kitty’s blank stare, her defensive posture and that awkwardly clenched hand combine to give her the look of a frightened animal rather than a grown woman.
The animalistic qualities continue to emerge on closer inspection: her fine eyebrows mirroring the kitten’s; the downy hair on her upper lip, evoking whiskers; the halo of frizz — more fur than hair. Kitty herself becomes subtly feline. The kitten, too, is suffused with tension.
Kitty’s grip around its neck suggests constriction rather than care. There is no softness or warmth in the connection between girl and cat. Instead the kitten hangs like a marionette, its front paws outstretched and limp. Its eyes bulge toward the viewer, confronting us with our own complicity in this constraint. The cat mirrors Kitty: caught, suspended, foreshadowing a kind of violence.
That sense of threat is deliberate. Freud once described his early portraits as acts of “visual aggression”. “I would sit very close and stare. It could be uncomfortable for both of us.” His now notorious relationships with womenoften simultaneous and marked by betrayal - underscore the coercive atmosphere here. Kitty’s avoidance of our gaze is not neutral suggesting submission, even entrapment.
As the novelist Julian Barnes reminds us, Freud “needed to dominate women in certain ways”. To revisit works like this today is not merely an aesthetic act but an ethical one, as we are called to confront the ultimate power of the artistchoosing who gets to be truly seen, and who is simply held still.
This, then, is ultimately a portrait about possession - about being looked at, about holding and being held - and the complications that arise from that. Freud and Kitty were newly involved at the time, their relationship marked by intensity, turbulence and eventual fracture. That history retroactively infects the painting, but even without knowing it we sense the electric charge between artist and subject. Freud’s is not the gaze of a stranger, but neither is it comfortably intimate. One might argue more that it is the gaze of an author writing himself onto another - the psychological undercurrent being that Kitty becomes a projection of Freud himself. A doubled self: both held and holding, both the kitten and the girl.
EMIZ ICOZ
Writers aged 14-16, Essay category, Write on Art 2025
Man Under a Pyramid, Anselm Kiefer (1996)
Standing in front of Anselm Kiefer’s Man under a Pyramid, I feel haunted, as if I am that man, lying beneath the tomb. I struggle, torn yet transfixed. Why am I disturbed? My mind races with questions. Is this what great art forces us to do: to unpack layers of meaning, not simply dismiss work that is unpleasing to the eye or wrestles with the mind? I leave, determined to understand more.
Kiefer’s work confronts traumatic legacies of German history, particularly the Holocaust. A German term, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, means “coping with the past”. Eddy Frankel discusses how discovering his father’s Wehrmacht uniform compelled Kiefer to explore hidden, shameful family histories, breaking the silence around the Holocaust. His challenging subject matter forced his contemporaries to deal with Germany’s past in an era when acknowledgment of Nazism was taboo. Kiefer’s art is contentious, confrontational, and sometimes ironic, leading critics to mistakenly claim he endorses Nazi ideologies.
Kiefer utilises heavy impasto and unconventional materials like ash. This technique suggests a preoccupation with decay, ash symbolises the physical process of decomposition. Kiefer’s structure is shaped like the Egyptian Great Pyramids, whose stepped walls were believed to offer the dead safe passage to heaven. However, it appears that salvation has not arrived for this man, a lifeless body reminiscent of a Concentration Camp victim. By re-contextualising the pyramid motif for a post-Holocaust era, Kiefer evokes the weight of history.
The brick-like structure recalling earlier Kiefer works, like Athanor, where Nazi mausoleums serve as stark reminders of war’s haunting legacy. Death camp crematories were also made of bricks, with large chimney flues similar in shape to the towering mass of bricks in Kiefer’s pyramid.
However, some claim the painting continues Kiefer’s interest in meditation and the linking of body and mind, referencing theories of Carl Jung. The textured surface, layered imagery and symbolic motifs invite reflection on a multisensory level. Influenced by Robert Fludd, Kiefer explores relationships between the microcosm (human body) and macrocosm (the universe) commenting on the cyclical nature of life and death. The pyramid form can be interpreted as a cosmic symbol, linking human consciousness to the heavens.
Kiefer is inspired by histories and philosophies. His art is intentionally ambiguous, inviting personal interpretation. For me, the pyramid is a metaphor for the weight of the Nazi regime, its heaviness crushing humanity. The painting is autobiographical - man, singular, aloneKiefer frustrated in his sole quest to confront a tumultuous history, his family’s and his country’s, still haunted to this day. I, too, remain disquieted, existentially challenged to keep thinking beyond my own lived experience.
1. Eddy Frankel, Anselm Kiefer: Early Works review – his Nazi salute dominates a show haunted by horrors, February 11, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/feb/11/anselm-kiefer-early-worksreview-nazi-salute-war
2. https://www.theartstory.org/artist/kiefer-anselm/
3. Andreas Huyssen, ‘Kiefer in Berlin’, 1992, October 62: 84 - 101
4. National Gallery of Scotland, https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/87194
5. https://iterarte.com/jung-role-of-the-artist/
6. https://www.artistrooms.org/artists/anselm-kiefer
EVIE MURRAY
Writers aged 14-16, Creative Writing category, Write on Art 2025
Judith Slaying Holofernes, Adam Elsheimer (ca.1601-1603)
The breeze lifts the drape, sun revealing an opening: his head lies severed on the white mattress. Previously the only understated piece of furniture in the room, the silk now soaks, stained, with a liquid thick and spurting. He’s clutching at it desperately, nails embedded in his palm, green veins of his arm straining beneath the surface of the skin. It’s sticky now, covered in blood. The light is golden and suffusive; it washes away the years, the turmoil, and he is young and shining, luminous. Her eyes attempt to fixate on the limp mound, immovable and locked, his have a glossy sheen, dilated in anticipation, awakened and alive with recognition. Tongue wet and uncomfortable, her eyebrows crease as she squints: this is hard. She grips the handle tighter. Slippery, it proves difficult to drive further into his head, so she grabs a fistful of his hair. It feels less dignifiedbefore it was planned and meticulous- now it’s savage and untame. Judith knows, from the constant flutter of his eyelids and the way his hand is curled so tight she can feel strain without touching him, that he is in unaccountable pain. His lips part, gaping, to exhale his final breath as his energy is leached, stolen for a whispered prayer spoken only for himself and God. The light turns clinical and artificial; the blade drops from her hands.
The watcher smiles cruelly, a figure in shadow, stretching both mouth and fabric taut. It pushes back the curtain, one inch, two, to watch as her final ounce of goodness drains. Occasionally it whispers sweetly from afar, encouraging her gently: push just that little bit harder, that’s it, for me, yet keeping its distance. In its still and unshaking hands, the bag is vacant and ready. Brown wool scratches at its bony wrists; they press it closer, revelling in its harsh touch. The bag awaits, and once full it sighs in satisfaction at the weight of the guilty. A bell rings out, the people cry: ‘the house of God is saved’.
Judith leans, doubled over, and the bile rises up in her throat, acidic and stinging. She reaches out- anything will do- retching into a golden vessel. Wine, half-drunk, and a pale yellow-green become one. Now she remembers, the fingers pressing into her, taunting her. She attempted to push them away but they returned again, more forceful this time.
The candle is blown out. The watcher retreats, still smiling. The simple cross around Judith’s bare pale neck, proudly displayed, falls to the ground and rests wedged between wooden planks, forgotten.
GINEVRA DE ANGELI
Writers aged 17-19, Review category, Write on Art 2025
Self-Portrait as Catherine of Alexandria, Artemisia Gentileschi (ca.1615-1617)
Growing up with Naples as my second home, surrounded by the grandeur of Baroque churches and galleries, Artemisa Gentileschi’s paintings spoke to me in a deeply impactful way. Her Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (ca. 1615–17) is a work that continues to speak to me. It shows not just a saint, but a woman who refused to let others define her story, a figure of courage and defiance.
In this painting, Artemisia depicts herself as Saint Catherine, a scholar and martyr who, according to legend, defied a Roman emperor and was condemned to death on a spiked wheel. The symbolism of the broken wheel and the palm of martyrdom is clear, but what I find powerful is how Artemisia merges her own identity with that of the saint. After surviving rape and enduring a humiliating public trial, she chose to present herself not as a victim but as a figure of strength and dignity. Art historian Mary Garrard describes this as a deliberate alignment with female heroism in order to express both personal and universal resilience.
The composition is intimate and striking. Artemisia looks directly at the viewer, her face framed by dark hair and soft light. She holds the palm branch lightly; the broken wheel gripped tightly in her hand. The rich fabric of the deep red dress and the crown on her head suggest both nobility and virtue. But what holds my attention most is her gaze. Unlike so many women in Baroque art, who look down or to heaven, Artemisia looks straight at us. There is calm confidence in her expression, as if she is challenging us to see her truth. As Whitney Chadwick argues, Gentileschi’s paintings reject the passivity expected of women in art, asserting presence and agency instead. For me, this gaze feels deeply rooted in bold feminine energy: Artemisia is not there to be objectified or pitied.
She asserts her presence and her power.
The painting’s Baroque style exemplified through the use of chiaroscuro, the rich textures, the dramatic but controlled lighting all serve to enhance this sense of strength. The background fades into shadow, forcing our attention onto Artemisia herself. The tactile quality of the fabrics and the realistic rendering of her features make her both saintly and real. I’ve always admired how she resists the typical Baroque portrayal of women as either seductresses or passive victims. Here, she is neither. She is thoughtful, intelligent, and determined.
I also think about how Artemisia was positioning herself professionally through this portrait. Gentileschi’s self-portraits were not just personal expressions but strategic tools, designed to appeal to patrons by showing her as virtuous, learned, and worthy of respect. In a world where female artists were so often questioned, Gentileschi crafted her image carefully but with genuine dignity, not empty flattery.
Today, Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria is one of Gentileschi’s best-known works, and its acquisition by London’s National Gallery in 2018 was celebrated as a long overdue recognition of her significance. This painting continues to resonate with me because it reminds me that women can define their own image, even in the face of injustice. Artemisia’s portrait is not just a masterpiece of Baroque art, it is timeless statement of courage, strategy, and self-determination.
GRACE VYVAN
Writers aged 17-19, Creative Writing category, Write on Art 2025
Anemones, Robert Lillie (ca.1867-1949)
I place the vase on the windowsill where the light is softest in the afternoon. A warm, buttery glow which flatters even the dullest of things. It’s where I put the best of my flowers; the ones I paint and pretend will last.
These are anemones picked this morning from the garden. In my hands they lay frail, but I chose them for their boldness. No shy, retiring blooms. Anemones are brave. They stretch wide as if daring the world to look. I admire that. I was once like that before my body softened and the world’s gaze drifted elsewhere.
I toy with my paintbrush and study the flowers, unsure of how to begin. I turn the vase slightly, letting the red one face forward. It is opened up and brazen, unaware of the inevitable fade which will come. The violet ones sag a little. Already. It’s only been a day. My brush trembles slightly as it touches the canvas. I focus on steadying my hand and make soft brushstrokes; brushstrokes of earthy tones: reds, browns, blues, which bleed gently into the shadows.
I once tried to dry flowers, to hold their shape past their prime. I hung them upside down like little martyrs. But dried flowers aren’t truthful. They hold no scent, no softness, just a paper memory; a kind of taxidermy. You can keep the shape, but not the soul.
It’s the same with photos, really. I look at old ones and I don’t recognize the girl. Her skin was smooth and her hair fell in waves which would dance in the wind. I can’t remember how she felt in her own skin, only that she believed she would always bloom. And that was a lie.
The petals of each flower seem almost alive under my brush, whispering stories of their satisfactions and sorrows. I touch the red anemone lightly, as though it might bruise.I know it won’t last.
A few days? Maybe a week? That’s the shelf life. Even shorter in the sun, but I won’t deny them the light. “Stay a little longer,” I whisper. “You’re so beautiful.”
I never begged like that when I was young. I assumed beauty stayed if you took care of it. Now I know that it doesn’t stay; it merely visits. It visits and then it leaves. That’s the arrangement. The bloom, the fade, the fall. And we are lucky, so lucky, just to witness the blooming hour.
The light is now fading and the evening has become quiet. Shadows have begun pooling in each corner of the room like muffled memories, but luminescence radiates from each flower; they are like little lamps. I reach for the pinks and whites, which seem so flat on my palette but when blended on the canvas form translucent petals and create a subtle glow, daring the darkness to swallow them. I plunge my anemones into the black. A stillness. A fragility and quiet resignation. When I die, I think I’d like to come back as a flower. As an anemone. So I can feel again what it is like to open, to be seen, to know you’re lovely, and to not know how soon it ends.
But for now, I’ll keep growing anemones. And I’ll keep putting them in the window, where the light is soft. And I will paint them, capturing their presence. And they will be beautiful, just for a while.
MABLI JONES
Writers aged 14-16, Review category, Write on Art 2025
St George and the Dragon, Unknown Artist (ca.1517)
St George stands alone at Compton Verney, the weight of England slung across his shoulder. He wasn’t always alone, I remember a few months ago standing before him as he looked towards his siblings instead of me. A noble saint that once looked upon a young Christ now turned towards a gallery full of school children who most definitely won’t save humanity from sin. It gives me a buzz of satisfaction in my chest that even the greats can be humbled by stuck up teens. It’s crazy how relatable a man from the fourth century can be.
As a member of a Welsh family, I shouldn’t pay too much attention to him, especially as he clutches a dragon in his left hand and an English flag in his right. Untouched, the disgusted look of my father sits at the back of my mind as I lean in to look at him. My fingers twitch with the urge to touch the man’s armour, turning cold with the thought. Heroically I don’t touch, I could tell the security man in the corner wouldn’t appreciate it, even if it does look like he would rather be asleep. I could also tell George might not appreciate it, the thought of the dead man turning his frozen head towards me sends the bite from my fingers to my spine. Evidently, the man does not turn his gaze, his dark eyes stay fixed on where his brothers should be. A breath catches in my throat as I stop myself from telling the righteous saint that he may not see them again, that he couldn’t follow their march back up to their collection in Scotland.
I think of The Lamination of Christ with a Group of Donors that sits up in Edinburgh, until last year it had not seen Saint George for thirty years and while I feel like I could be free of my brother thirty years, a pang of sorrow hits my chest. Christ with his Group of donors travelled 327 miles to be reunited with its brother just to be ripped apart and while Christ may not look towards the saint, the saint certainly looks towards his missing partner.
Eyes pointed to the window passing through the space where they used to be, the ghost of the saviour lingering to only the mind of the forgotten saint. Not forgotten by his country but perhaps forgotten by the painting made to be by his side.
MADISON GAZARD
Writers aged 17-19, Review category, Write on Art 2025
Nude Floating Over a Dark Pond II, Arthur Boyd (1962)
It is not often I come across a piece of art that so tragically captures the imitation of stillness, the elusiveness of a calmy destructive state, and the painful fragility of what it is to be human. Yet Arthur Boyd’s 1962 ‘Nude Floating over a Dark Pond II’ demands us to pause time and not just observe, but suffer too with the figure. Slowly and quietly. Viewing this piece for the first time, I felt cornered into a grotesque void, unsettled with the unfamiliar quiet of self-estrangement. This is not a painting to look at; it is one to psychologically become.
Boyd, having been conscripted in the Australian cartographic unit during World War II, was no stranger to the presence of grievous infliction on both the physical and emotional. His contemplations of human belonging in a world that seems to brutalize itself is heavily imprinted within this piece. The subject appears to hesitate in space, ghostly, translucent, invisible as if ill from the poisonous greens and browns surrounding her, eating the colour from her flesh. Boyd’s expressionistic brush strokes unflinchingly hurl the empty figure into disorder and ruin, which she lifelessly, placidly succumbs to. She seems to linger between worlds as a whole person and an evaporating concept of one. She becomes simply a body.
I fear the branches behind her as their juxtaposing sharpness warps into menacing figures preying like vultures on her submission to what feels an aching grief. A dissonance grows between her and the exteriors of her physical self. It appears as if her autonomy has been drained, her conscience pulled far below into the pond she hovers above. I begin to witness this strange distance within myself.
As my peripheral vision further dissipates into the painting’s melancholia, I am left exposed to feel the malignant waters filling my veins
and the pounding of a cold world on my skin. A searing chill. Boyd contrasts this through colour by suggesting a fiery, orange pressure amalgamating with the floating figure, burning into her core from the grounds beneath. The piece seems to hold restrain on a volatile malice emerging from the Earth, angry, hot, heaving for revenge on its ruthless inhabitants, its invaders. What has humankind become? I drift further from myself and begin to crawl with the hostility of paint and colour, where a combat between natural elements ensues to overturn the present into the natural order of the past.
Arthur Boyd strips the onlooker from any preoccupations they had before viewing the piece and forces them to sit numbly in the anguish of human suffering. I now feel as if I exist as two, submitting to the corrosivity of life as is conjured in the painting. Reality becomes intangible. A distant memory. A fleeting feeling. The artist’s dappled application of unpigmented paint, with compliments of white on the figure’s body makes her appear as a weightless ethereal light in a landscape of endless shadow. She seems to be whispering to me through her mesmeric sheen, a spiritual finality appearing within her as if she’s withdrawing from herself, metamorphosising into another entity, an otherworldly realm.
I view this painting under the glare of a screen’s blue light, feeling bound emotionally within, yet physically worlds away from the reality of the faceless, uninhabited woman. Denied warmth. Hungry for the stability of who I was before being struck by an impending abandonment of hope, the figure’s despair seeping fluidly through me. A pond of dull languish sits below me as Boyd leaves me floating, exposed to the temporary state of the human condition. A universal pain.
RUBY SMITH
Writers aged 17-19, Creative Writing category, Write on Art 2025
We Are Only Human, Ryan Gander (2022)
Returning to the beach of my childhood, I find it changed; or rather, I don’t find it at all. It has been swallowed.
As a child I’d played there often. Hidden from tourists by curves of clay cliffs, it became a mermaid’s cove, a pirate’s sanctuary, a castaway’s paradise. Now, I hitch my trousers about my knees, wading clumsily through the murky waves. Even at high tide the beach had never truly vanished, a defiant tumble of pebbles always protruding proudly, secure enough to moor picnic blankets and parasols on. You never had to worry about being cut off from the main strip of sand around the corner - as I have been now. The beach has aged alongside myself, hunching and thinning and pockmarked with scree, berms protruding rib-like.
I round the jutting headland and return to stable land once more. This glutted beach, squeezed between jutting groynes, is a portly contrast to its sibling mere metres downshore. I linger a moment, feeling the waves suck at my ankles: is this the same ancient, untameable force that can bite chunks from the earth? Only last week, this flat cerulean expanse was churned into a frenzy, waves whipped high enough to breach the sea wall lining the town promenade. White horses, my mum would call them - the foam capping each crest: I imagine a cavalry charge, whiteplumed helmets and sharp scowls of swords, rallying a coup against its former kin.
Yet we mobilise our machinery for good, surely; patch swathes of shoreline with concrete casts, fatten beaches with wooden groynes, reprofile and reshape and replenish. Nonetheless, we have been myopic with our prescribed sympathy. Beaches - like my beach - are starved and battered, forced to free landwards whilst towns and roads and oil refineries remain untouched, immortalised, as if cast in ice.
There are plans to build more coastal protection, to stop the farmers from plastering the seafront with their aggrieved block-capital leaflets. It’s
their land that’s being offered up to the hungry sea - acid-yellow rapeseed in exchange for preserving pipes and pavements. Dolos are to be installed, gobbets of concrete stacked like jacks in a child’s game. They possess a clinical chaos not found in the methods typically employed: sea walls, gabions, riprap, revetements - all straight and hard and disciplined. Dolos, whilst many-limbed and massive, feel softer. They have the intentional disorder of an abstract art installation whose meaning eludes you.
The day is clear enough to see all the way down the curve of the coast, to the bruise of the big town in the elbow of the next headland. A disfigured landscape caught in the crossfire between man and sea. An archaic landscape, born from travelling glaciers, lumps of clay discarded like pennies from a pocket. Perhaps the odd shapes of the dolos are intended to do more than merely disturb the march of the waves. Perhaps they are a flag, a mirror, an outstretched hand from a species repenting its past hostility. See, sea! they call. Like you, we are capable of chaos and beauty and strength. Like the scattered heaps of dolos, we pursue security in unity. Rest a moment, and lose your fury in this concrete tangle.
Out past the haze of heat, at the elusive horizon, the sea and sky blur to form an endless arc of blue. Cresting overhead, it is frothy with foam and cloud. These ancient frontiers have grown inflamed and vengeful against the infection of humanity. My back turned to the domesticated coastline, I feel very small, a grain of sand buffeted by monumental currents. The notion of these coastal defences challenging such planetary pestilence feels as pitiful as sandcastles against a storm.
Nonetheless, something compels us to try. Is it compassion, or hubris? Perhaps both, as within the elegant anchors of the dolos: munitions masquerading as natural entropy. Dolos, afterall, was the Roman spirit of deception.
YUXI CAI
Writers aged 14-16, Essay category, Write on Art 2025
Private John Moyse, The 3rd (East Kent, The Buffs) Regiment of Foot, Refusing to Kow-Tow before the Tartar Mandarin Tsan-koo-lin-sin, 2nd China War 1860, William Robertson Smith Stott (ca.1910)
Ah, the brave British soldier, frightened yet brimming with defiance.
His supposed superiority gleams through the canvas: his firm stance suggesting a discipline which contrasts with his hunched captors, his clothes cut with sharp brushstrokes instead of languid, almost primitive flow, fervent red against dusky blue. Although powerless, he is the centre of attention in this painting, all eyes drawn towards him. The others act merely as a background; a supporting cast whose sole purpose is to enrich the story of the White Man.
The painting depicts a scene in the Second Opium War, in which the Scottish sergeant Moyes was restrained and later executed for refusing to kowtow (prostrate) in front of the Chinese noble Tsan-Koo-Lin-Sin. Here, the seemingly transactional tale morphs into a commentary on morality and virtue. The role of victim shifts from the Chinese people to the unarmed Moyes, the shadow on his opponent pointing in an almost childish manner to his villainy, and the popular narrative of the underdog against the aristocracy is racialised. It is Moyes who is praised for his unwavering resistance in Doyle’s poem ‘The Private of the Buffs’: “Let dusky Indians whine and kneel; / An English lad must die.”.
History is shaped by its interpreters, and it is increasingly clear that Moyes’s story is no longer his own. Much like the poem’s false comment about him being English, seemingly minor artistic liberties in the painting - such as Moyes’s
height juxtaposed with his bowing companion - forms a sympathy towards the Western figure, sensationalising his sacrifice and proving his moral superiority.
British patriotism is rampant in this painting, but is the same not true for the other side? After all, the pride of the noble in demanding reverence can be equated to the sergeant’s refusal to bow to a ‘lesser’ race, reflecting attitudes during the war with the Chinese belief that it was the ‘centre of the world’, and similar British dismissal of China in its harsh diplomatic demands. Patriotism shapes our perspectives –my first reaction was one of prejudice against the Scottish soldier, much like how Doyle saw him as a hero. All art nurtures the biases of both the artist and the viewer, and this painting demonstrates the malleability of history in a format which implies objectivity. Versions of the narrative entangle into a flurry of truths.
ZACHARY BAUM
Writers aged 17-19, Essay category, Write on Art 2025
Untitled (third in the ‘Korabra’ series), Gavin Jantjes (1986)
In the Akan language of Ghana, Korabra means “to go and come back.” It refers to the souls of the departed, but also the funeral drum that marks their passage. Gavin Jantjes borrows this word for a series of seven paintings made in 1986, all haunted by the ghosts of the transatlantic slave trade. To me, Untitled (Third in the “Korabra” series) is the most arresting. Two figures stand at the edge of a pier. Behind them, to the right of the foreground, a closed gate blocks their path to the land; beyond it, a solitary, austere pillar stands like a monument to the colonial structures that remain. To the left, a boat looms like an apparition, its form echoes the silhouettes of the spirits and its mast is cruciform in shape. Their bodies are pale and skeletal, their faces elongated and indistinct, recalling West African funerary masks; their double shadows stretch unnaturally upward across the canvas.
Born in apartheid South Africa, Jantjes experienced systems of segregation firsthand. Black South Africans were confined to separate spaces, and denied equality. His cultural heritage reflects the British colonial and Christian canon shared with much of West Africa, distinct from the Islamic-Swahili traditions of East Africa. Here, identity is not simply individual, but something inherited through ancestry and lineage; shaped by collective memory. This is visible in the doubled shadows, where their supernatural vertical stretch up the canvas implies that trauma dominates every plane of African life. The shadows imply that the enslaved bore more than their own bodies, carrying the genealogical weight of a people. They suggest the Korabra spirits themselves are still hovering over the living. As Saidiya Hartman writes of the “afterlife of slavery,” trauma always endures, resurfacing in the present. Jantjes constructs a visual elegy, “a third space,” where the past is neither repressed nor reconciled.
Their attention is not fixed on the viewer, but on the vessel to their left, a witness to exile, suggesting an inherited memory of systemic displacement; echoing Frantz Fanon’s idea of the colonised as “overdetermined from without,”
their selfhood fractured by a loss of autonomy. Each figure becomes a double: what they were, and what the world made of them.
At the painting’s foreground, the pier becomes a liminal space. Two naked figures stand still, facing the viewer with confronting intensity. The slanting rain intensifies the emotional atmosphere of grief and isolation. Their stance is exposing; the left figure, female, shields her genitalia; the right, male, stands in contrapposto, arms behind his back. They are not fullyabstracted but gendered bodies rendered uncannily real by their hips and shoulders. Yet, their heads hang unnaturally low, inverted and abstracted, as if severed from upright human dignity. This evokes Egyptian wall reliefs, where forms of servants were anonymised to signify universal work. Jantjes revives this convention to resist the voyeurism of Western depictions of Black suffering. There is no appeal to pity, only a confrontation with the corporeality of trauma, denied the relief of catharsis.
Walter Mignolo reminds, “coloniality is far from over, and so must be decoloniality.” Jantjes renders this ongoingness through aesthetic inversion; the sky, often symbolic of heaven, becomes a canopy of violence. The sky bears down with oppressive weight, scumbled in dark blues and bruised greys. The doubled shadows reach to the top of the canvas, suggesting trauma is an inescapable force. In this inverted cosmology, the divine is replaced by the unresolved. The boat, moored off the pier, recalls the slave ships of the Middle Passage. It links apartheid to the broader African diasporic experience of expulsion, exile, and statelessness. Jantjes’ sea is not expansive, occupying only a corner of the foreground, and compressed into a near-opaque gradient of dark blue, verging on black, like a symbolic grave. Jantjes implicates the viewer: there is no shimmer or illusion of freedom, only a claustrophobic expanse, as though the ocean had turned carceral, not guiding them to salvation, but even deeper into bondage.
1. “Untitled | Art UK,” Artuk.org, 2025, https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/untitled-19251/search/2025-keyword:gavin-jantjes--referrer:global-search/page/1/view_as/grid.
2. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus And Giroux, 2007).
3. Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Brantford, Ont.: W. Ross Macdonald School Resource Services Library, 2012).
4. Walter D Mignolo, “Coloniality Is far from Over, and so Must Be Decoloniality,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 43 (2017): 38–45, https://doi.org/10.2307/26558074.
