Early Career Award recipients 2025/26

We're very pleased to announce our Early Career Award recipients for 2025/26.

• Niamh Hannaford is an Irish artist whose practice is formed by an obsession with materials and their cloaked values. Through performative assemblage, she creates active artworks which require cyclical maintenance (Goldsmiths MFA Award).

• Gabriel Kidd is currently thinking about: not-knowing, yearning, human cruising sites, non-human cruising sites, transitions between states, atmospheres of chance, life after habitat, failures, fragile things, flexible things, hard things made soft, soft things stitched together, wool, silk, latex, becoming a sheep, or a boulder, or a body in the bog and stumbling on to something you weren’t invited to but staying to watch anyway (Adrian Carruthers Award).

• Lauma Muižarāja’s practice currently spans mixed media assemblage, writing and installation. Her work is getting increasingly more fragile – she likes to use humble, lightweight materials such as plywood, corrugated cardboard, popcorn, pasta and other household or food items, as well as various hobby materials that are usually marketed to children (Helen Scott Lidgett Award).

• Fi Sonola views her practice as an interdisciplinary machine, with its primary purpose being this internal rebuilding of identity post trauma, while also understanding how society shapes this identity and, in turn, how that identity goes on to affect society (Helen Scott Lidgett Award).

Acme’s early career programme provides artists in their first five years of practice with a variety of support structures, including financial subsidy, rent relief, professional development, mentoring, presentation and exhibition opportunities.

We would like to thank our partners Central Saint Martins, Slade School of Fine Art, Art Academy of Latvia and Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as our 2025/26 guest selectors Matthew Krishanu, Ruben Salgado-Perez, Sarah McCrory and Dr Hannah Catherine Jones.