Dates: 27 November 2026 – 12 February 2027
Location: TheGallery, AUB Campus
TheGallery at Arts University Bournemouth (AUB) is proud to present the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2026 – an internationally renowned exhibition celebrating excellence, innovation and diversity in contemporary drawing.
The exhibition opens TheGallery’s 2026–27 Exhibition Programme and continues AUB’s longstanding relationship with the Drawing Prize.
With the presentation of the 2026 touring exhibition, TheGallery will have hosted the Drawing Prize on eight occasions, reflecting its continued commitment to supporting, championing, and showcasing contemporary drawing practice.
Featuring outstanding works selected from submissions across the UK and internationally, the exhibition offers audiences a unique opportunity to engage with the breadth, diversity, and vitality of contemporary drawing today.
Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize: in detail
Founded in 1994 by artist and Professor Anita Taylor and Paul Thomas, the exhibition was originally established as the Rexel Derwent Open Drawing Exhibition. It became the Cheltenham Open Drawing Exhibition from 1996 to 2000 and the Jerwood Drawing Prize from 2001 to 2017.
Since 2018, with the support of the Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust, it's been presented as the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize.
Led by founding director Professor Anita Taylor, the exhibition provides an important platform for emerging, mid-career and established artists and drawing practitioners. Selected from thousands of submissions each year, it offers audiences an insight into the diversity and changing nature of drawing today.
The 2026 exhibition marks the ninth year of generous support from the Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust for Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize. The Trust also provided additional support for the educational programme devised by Drawing Projects UK, including an education pack, a symposium, drawing sessions and drawing discussions throughout the exhibition, run in London
The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize is recognised as the UK’s leading annual open exhibition dedicated to drawing.
The 2026 call received 2,621 entries from 1,403 artists across 48 countries, highlighting the international reach and continuing vitality of drawing as a contemporary art form.
The 2026 exhibition brings together 92 selected drawings by 86 artists living and working across the UK, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Spain and the USA.
The selected works demonstrate the remarkable breadth of contemporary drawing practice. From modest and large-scale works on paper to moving image and three-dimensional works, the exhibition encompasses a wide range of subjects, ideas and approaches.
These include observational and documentary drawing, social commentary, scientific systems, abstraction and expression, as well as narratives, storytelling, memory and imagined worlds.
Together, the works demonstrate how drawing continues to evolve as an experimental,
- The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2026 – awarded to Yvonne Crossley
- Student Award – awarded to Elena Grossi
- Three Boroughs' Award – awarded to Lucie Holzer
- Highly Commended: Siân Bowen, Gary Lawrence, and Simon Page
Matthew Burrows, MBE
Matthew Burrows is an artist and founder of Artist Support Pledge. A painter working in East Sussex, he's represented by Vigo Gallery in London.
Working primarily at scale, his paintings explore themes of embodiment, spirituality, nature and collective care. His practice is informed by contemplative traditions and an interest in how art can foster wellbeing and connection.
Matthew studied at Birmingham School of Art and the Royal College of Art, and has been Artist-in-Residence at Gloucester Cathedral and The National Gallery in London.
In 2020, he founded Artist Support Pledge, a widely acclaimed gift-economy platform supporting artists internationally, for which he received an MBE and multiple cultural awards. Alongside his studio practice, he mentors artists through the Turps Off Site programme.
Sook-Kyung Lee
Sook-Kyung Lee is director of the Whitworth and Professor of Curatorial Practices at the University of Manchester.
Lee has worked as a curator, writer and lecturer in the UK and internationally, advocating global art histories and transnational curating. She was the artistic director of the 14th Gwangju Biennale (2023), the Commissioner and Curator of the Korea Pavilion and the Curator of the Japan Pavilion at the 56th and 60th Venice Biennales (2015, 2024).
Lee was previously senior curator of international art at Tate Modern, working in exhibitions and acquisitions, and headed a major multi-year research initiative – Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational.
Anita Taylor, RWA (Hon)
Anita Taylor is the founding director of the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize (1994) and Drawing Projects UK (2009).
As an artist, curator and educator, she fosters new approaches to, and understanding of, the role of drawing as a fundamental means of ideation, communication and expression in specialist and inter-disciplinary contexts, through exhibitions (as curator and practitioner), publications and public engagement activities.
A Professor of Fine Art since 2002, she's held numerous leadership roles in higher education including Dean of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee (2019–26); Executive Dean, Bath School of Art and Design, Bath Spa University (2013–19); Director and CEO, National Art School, Australia (2009–13); Vice Principal, Dean Wimbledon College of Art, London (2004–09) and Director of The Centre for Drawing, University of the Arts London (2006–09).
She's represented by Vision Art Platform, Istanbul.
Curator and exhibiting artists
MA
Susan Absolon | Elisa Alaluusua | Iain Andrews | Lucy Austin | Fi Bailey | Jeanette Barnes | Sharon Beavan | Vivien Blackett | Mandy Bonnell | Jane Bottery | Sian Bowen | Ruth Brumby | Lucinda Burgess | Caroline Burraway | Richard Burton | Robbie Bushe | Stephen Carley | Annie Cattrell | Louise Cattrell | Jung-Geun Choi | Liz Coxford | Yvonne Crossley | Kelly Cumberland | Adam Dant | Toni Davey | Jane Dixon | Steven Dixon | Sarah Duncan | Roy Eastland | Bella Easton | Kristian Evju | Sophie Firth | Charlie Ford | Efe Gago | Greg Genestine-Charlton | Ann Gillies | The Baron Gilvan | Andy Gomez | Aron Greenwood | Richard Gregory | Nick Grellier | Elena Grossi | Lee Hardman | Russell Herron | Harriet Mena Hill | Tracy Hill | Charlotte Hodes | Lucie Holzer | Alanna Luz Hutton | Christopher Jones | Nick Kennedy | Gary Lawrence | M Lohrum | Juliette Losq | William Lowry | Norman Mathieson | Heather McAteer | Kate McDonnell | Janet Melrose | George Meyrick | Jim Mooney | Tamsin Nagel | Simon Page | Patricia Paolozzi Cain | Lalinthorn Phencharoen | Sandra Porter | Dan Roach | Lewis Robinson | Clive Rose | Eunice Routledge | Paul Ryan | Minty Sainsbury | Solveig Settemsdal | Maggie Shafran | Chris Shaw Hughes | Stuart Shearer | Mark Shields | David Symonds | Sarah Tew | Chris Thomas | Jonathan Waller | Calum Wallis | Hannah Wu | Qinlin Yang | Trevor Youdale | Zhi Qian Jacqueline Yu
Drawing at AUB
Drawing is positioned at the very heart of contemporary creative practice, and is taught at AUB as an extension of thinking. Throughout our lives, we're all mark-makers of one kind or another, and drawing is an essential and fundamental form of our need to communicate. AUB celebrates its diversity; from its capacity for directness of expression, conceptualising ideas through algorithms and data structures, mechanical evocations, to exploring Eastern influences, topographies, the behaviour and properties of materials, sound and light, to analogous and metaphorical narratives.
It exists as both an autonomous and self-contained discipline with its own histories, theories and practices, as well as being positioned perfectly to explore the blurring of boundaries across disciplines. Contemporary drawing is concerned with the ways in which we relate as human beings to each other, to our environment, communicating and investigating the political, cultural, and historical, and our psychological and physiological selves.
Drawing can be hand-made, manufactured or digital. It can be sculptural, physical, exist in real space or on a screen, it can be sewn or worn, it can move, it can be projected, it can exist on the body, the possibilities are limitless. However, what it must do is challenge and interrogate preconceived ideas, notions and traditions. It should make you think and question the world we live in.
Partnerships and collaboration at AUB
The AUB exhibition hang has been curated by Violet M. McClean hosting the Drawing Prize at TheGallery.
Violet’s curatorial approach includes inviting emerging curators and students to contribute to the exhibition hang programme, creating opportunities for them and students undertaking formal studies to gain practical experience within a professional gallery environment and curatorial studies and practise.
Through this initiative, TheGallery supports graduates and emerging curators through mentoring and professional development, helping to cultivate new voices and perspectives within contemporary curatorial practice.
The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2026 offers visitors the opportunity to experience the innovation, technical accomplishment and diversity that define contemporary drawing today.
- Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust: In 1998, the then-owners, London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC), set up the Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust with a 125-year lease to hold the land and their vision in trust for the people of London, while the freehold was passed to the LB Tower Hamlets. Trinity Buoy Wharf is a thriving centre for the arts and creative industries with a rare community of over 500 like-minded people enjoying the unique riverside location.
- Parker Harris: The Project Manager for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, Parker Harris is one of the leading visual arts consultancies in the UK, creating and managing a range of contemporary visual arts projects, nationally and internationally.
- Drawing Projects UK: Founded by Anita Taylor in 2009, initially to deliver the Jerwood Drawing Prize. Drawing Projects UK established an independent Centre for Drawing and Contemporary Art in Wiltshire in 2015 and is dedicated to research and public engagement in and through drawing supported by its exhibition and project spaces, studios and creative workspaces, meeting rooms and café. Drawing Projects UK originates and produces curated exhibitions and public programmes at its centres in Wiltshire and Dundee, as well as delivering off-site projects nationally and internationally. Drawing Projects UK publishes the annual Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize publications, devises and delivers the public engagement activities for the annual exhibitions, and manages the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize website and social media channels.
- The Big Draw: The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2026 is delivered in partnership with The Big Draw. Founded in 2000 by the Guild of St George, The Big Draw, originally known as the Campaign for Drawing, is an arts education charity dedicated to raising the profile of drawing as a tool for wellbeing, thought, creativity, and social and cultural engagement. The charity leads a diverse programme of advocacy, empowerment and engagement, and is the founder and driving force behind The Big Draw Festival – the world’s biggest celebration of drawing.
Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2026 – formal opening and private view
Join us at TheGallery, Arts University Bournemouth for the formal opening and private view of the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2026.
