Deborah Smith

 

Curator, Former Director at Arts Council Collection

 

https://deborahsmith.net/

Deborah Smith is a curator and consultant whose work centres on collaborative strategies and the presentation of interdisciplinary practices. Her practice spans exhibitions, public-realm commissions, and multi-strand programmes that integrate learning, engagement, and interpretation.

She previously served as Director of the Arts Council Collection—the UK’s most widely circulated national collection of modern and contemporary British art—as well as Interim Head of Programmes at the Serpentine Galleries and Associate Curator at Arup, the global engineering and design company, amongst other roles in the arts.

Deborah currently sits on the Museum + Heritage Awards judging panel, is a Shadow Board Member at The Box in Plymouth, a member of the University of Warwick Art Collection Committee, and serves on the HS2 Independent Design Panel. She was recently appointed to the UK Parliament Collections Advisory Group.

 

Caroline Walker

 

Artist, MA RCA, public collections include Tate and National Galleries of Scotland

 

https://carolinewalker.org/

Caroline Walker is a contemporary Scottish painter known for representing the everyday lives of women and highlighting the sites of their domestic and affective labour.

Past notable solo institutional exhibitions include those at The Hepworth Wakefield, UK (2025); Fitzrovia Chapel, London, UK (2022); K11, Shanghai, China (2022); KM21, The Hague, The Netherlands (2021); Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham, England (2021) and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, England (2018). Walker’s work is also represented in major public collections including Tate, UK; National Galleries of Scotland, UK; Longlati Foundation, Shanghai, China; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, USA and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA.

 

Faye Wei Wei

 

Painter, featured in British Vogue’s ‘One to Watch’, exhibited internationally

 

Faye conceives of the painting process as an intimate choreography between actual and pictorial space. A collector of antiquity, fragments of poems, found objects and images that for her are treasures that hold something of the spirit of Hopkins’s poetic theory of inscapes that anchors her imaginative world within the tangible. She is concerned with making as a means to hold the ineffable bound to the painting object—utilising imagined worlds through compositional disharmony, painterly gestures and colours that vibrate and jostle. She has a deep desire to conjure a transference of feeling.

 

Brogan Bertie

 

Winner of Sky Portrait Artist of the Year 2024

 

https://www.broganbertie.com/

Brogan Bertie (b. 1995, South London) is a painter and artist based in Margate. He graduated from London College of Communication in 2019 and went on to work in freelance illustration and animation before training in leatherwork with Margate based Cope Studio. Alongside this Brogan developed an artistic practice in portraiture and went on to win Sky Arts Portrait artist of the year. He now works exclusively as a fine artist from his studio at TKE in Margate.

 

Max Naylor

 

Tutor at Royal Drawing School, first ever winner of Jackson’s Art Prize 2016

 

https://www.instagram.com/maxnaylorart/?hl=en

Max Naylor is a professional artist living in Bristol, UK, where he is a studio holder at Spike Island. Along side his own fine art practice Max is a tutor at the Royal Drawing School in London. Max has completed a number of international residencies including time spent in Los Angeles and Delhi. He has won the Discerning Eye Drawing Bursary and Jacksons Art Prize in 2016. He has exhibited widely in the UK and has his work in private collections throughout the world.

 

Eleanor Johnson

 

Painter, winner of Jackson’s Art Prize 2025, exploring myth and the human form

 

https://www.eleanor-johnson.com/

Eleanor Johnson holds a BA in Art History from UCL and an MA in Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School. In 2019, she participated in a two-month residency at Palazzo Monti in Brescia, Italy. Her work is in private collections and institutions in the UK, US, Europe, West Africa, Asia, and South America. She currently lives and works in Oxford, UK.

Eleanor won Jackson’s Art Prize in 2025 with her painting Slick With Olive Oil.