ESW/ECA Graduate Awards 2025

Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop is excited to announce the selected artists for the ESSW/ECA Awards 2025: Carys Reynolds, Esther Castle, Niamh Finnigan, and Sophie Hall. These four talented artists will spend three months at ESW creating new work and benefiting from the extensive resources available.

As part of the award, the artists will receive 24-hour access to studio space, support, and training from ESW’s technical team, as well as mentorship from the program team. Additionally, each artist will receive a £500 budget for materials and consumables, and have full access to the workshop’s equipment and facilities. ESW will also provide accommodation for two of the artists, offering those who have relocated after graduation the opportunity to return to Edinburgh for the duration of the residency.

Carys Reynolds is an artist who explores themes of care, collectivity, and environmental sustainability through her work. A graduate of Edinburgh College of Art, she employs discarded materials in her practice, investigating how these often-overlooked objects can foster creativity and resilience. Her work spans drawing, painting, and sculpture, with a particular focus on circularity and uncertainty—key traits she sees in creative processes. 

Reynolds uses found and created objects to document and comment on contemporary environmental issues, linking them to broader landscapes. This engagement with materials and the environment serves not only to reflect on ecological challenges but also to offer insight into emotional healing, care, and the complexities of conflict. Through this approach, she creates an alternative framework for understanding and interacting with the environment. 

You can find out more about her work here

Esther Castle is an Edinburgh-based artist whose work delves into personal experiences of childhood illness, using art as a means to explore and transform these realities. Through a process of “fictioning reality,” she reimagines and reframes her past through artistic expression. A key element of her work is the investigation of garden spaces, where she draws symbolic connections between non-normative bodies and weeds, which are often deemed undesirable and removed by gardeners. 

Castle’s anthropomorphic sculptures are inspired by the way cancer cells were described to her as mysterious, uncontrollable growths. This idea of curious, unexplainable growths informs the organic and sometimes unsettling forms of her creations. Through her art, Castle offers a unique commentary on bodily difference, control, and societal perceptions of what is considered “natural” or “undesirable.” 

You can find out more about her work here

Niamh Finnigan is an artist whose work challenges traditional art conventions to provide sharp, humorous commentary on contemporary human behaviour. Her art is rooted in a candid portrayal of people, often shown in unflattering or morally ambiguous situations, subtly critiquing the social, ideological, and economic structures that shape society. Finnigan’s approach is both engaging and thought-provoking, inviting viewers to reflect on the complexities of modern life through her lens. 

Experimenting with mixed media, she frequently employs discarded materials like cardboard, fabric, packaging, and everyday detritus. These scrap materials are assembled into crude, deliberately garish sculptures that convey a raw aesthetic. Through this process, Finnigan offers anthropological insights into 21st-century British culture, using her work to explore the contradictions, quirks, and absurdities of human behaviour in a way that is as humorous as it is critical. 

You can find out more about her work here

Sophie Hall’s artistic practice focuses on how we process and interpret visual information, particularly the ways in which our brains make sense of the unstable and perceptually challenging. Her work often includes elements of trompe l’oeil, but with an expanded, sculptural twist that temporarily deceives the viewer, only to unravel into ambiguity and uncertainty. This dynamic is central to her exploration of visual perception and the fleeting nature of interpretation. 

Hall primarily works with found materials such as off-cuts, scraps, and rejects—pieces that were once part of something larger. She transforms these fragments into temporary sculptures that bear the traces of their previous contexts and actions. These precarious compositions are constantly reconfigurable, allowing the same materials to take on new identities across different works. This circular process embeds the material language of a site into her creations, reflecting the transient relationships between objects, space, and meaning. Through this process, Hall’s work speaks to themes of impermanence, perception, and the evolving narratives of found objects. 

You can find out more about her work here