Small is Beautiful

43rd Edition

Unskilled Worker

London-based Helen Downie (b. 1965) is best known for her distinctive, expressive style of painting. Working under the moniker Unskilled Worker, her work is intimate and evocative, blending human figures, nature, and the fantastical into richly-layered narratives. 

A strong voice for women, Downie explores gender, identity, and emotional truth through her art. Her passion for inclusion and freedom of expression shapes a practice rooted in storytelling, one that speaks across boundaries and celebrates the importance of diversity. 

Issam Kourbaj (b. 1963)

Syrian-born Issam Kourbaj works in painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance. Based in Cambridge, for the past fourteen years, his practice has been rooted in the personal and universal themes of migration, displacement, and injustice. His work has been exhibited globally, including at the British Museum, Fitzwilliam Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Venice Biennale. For the BBC’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, Neil MacGregor, former Director of the British Museum, selected Kourbaj’s acclaimed installation on the Syrian migrant crisis Dark Water, Burning World as the 101st object. 

Goddess of Meeting Waters and A Line of Becoming are intimate constellations of memory, built from fragments layered like the sediment of forgotten lives.

Lisa Jahovic (b. 1985)

London-based Lisa Jahovic’s multidisciplinary practice is underpinned by an ongoing exploration of anthropomorphism - shifting between sculpture, film, and photography to portray conceptual and often poetic ideas. Jahovic casts everyday objects as her protagonists, making the inanimate animated and creating unexpected dialogues, giving voice to the seemingly mundane. Through the language of performative sculpture, she communicates ideas about identity, memory, and the nature of existence.

Olivia Bax (b. 1988, Singapore)

London-based Olivia Bax works predominantly in sculpture, assembling found and made objects into intricate ensembles. Her process blends construction, welding, and modelling, with metal serving both as support and an active part of the sculpture. Evoking nesting structures, curious habitats, and modes of habitation, her works are shaped by gestures such as sitting, reaching, leaning, and pulling.

Olivia Bax studied at Byam Shaw School of Art, London, receiving an MFA in Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. In 2024, Bax curated a major institutional exhibition situating a series of unknown ceramic sculptures by John Hoyland (1934-2011) in dialogue with contemporary sculpture, commencing at the Royal West of England Academy and touring to Sheffield Museums in 2025. Her work is is currently featured in The Long Now: Saatchi at 40 at Saatchi Gallery, London.

Tess Jaray (b. 1937)

The circle. There is always an attempt at reduction. To say as much with as little as possible. Surely a circle does this. It suggests an infinity of things, including representation of the shape of the world. It is used to express expansion and contraction, to start something and to finish it.

London-based Tess Jaray first received critical acclaim in the early 1960s for her particular use of hard-edged painting. Over the course of her distinguished career as one of the most influential British artists of the last century, she developed a practice that, despite sharing affiliations with minimalism, architectural drawing, Op Art and other movements, resists any singular classification. Jaray transforms architectural inspiration into abstract compositions, examining spatial paradoxes through geometric forms and patterns. Her works evoke a deep emotional response by oscillating between distance and closeness, making architectural structures feel tangible yet distant.

Tess Jaray studied at St Martin's School of Art and the Slade School of Art, where she later taught for many years. Her work is represented in international collections, including Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the British Museum. Amongst her public commissions are pavement designs in urban spaces, featuring in the forecourt of Victoria Station, London. In 2024, a major survey exhibition of Jaray's practice was presented at the Millennium Gallery, Sheffield.