The Percivals 2026

Serena Bentley:

When judging an art prize, we often become familiar with the finalists
in the first instance in reproduction. So we see these works on a screen rather than the physical prints themselves. And that was the case for me when I was judging this prize here. And this is a work that stood out to me from afar.

But obviously I always reserved judgment until I'm physically engaging with an artwork before I can make my final decision, and encountering this work physically for the first time, it was incredibly clear to me that this was still very much the winner.

And there's a very clear reason for that, and that this is a work that's singular and its vision and its execution. There's no other work like this in the show and exudes a real confidence in image making.

I was particularly interested in it because it's surreal. So this is obviously not a conventional portrait, and I love how the artist is disrupting our expectation of what we should see in a portrait, because obviously we cannot see this at his face.

And that frustrates our understanding of how to engage with this image. Yes, it's a self-portrait of the artist, but because the face is obscured, it permits us to have broader interpretations or responses to what we see here.

That said, I'm still looking for clues to who this person is. And if you look closely, we see details like a tattoo on her thumb, her manicure, her tattoos, which do speak to the individual.

But what else is happening here is that the artist is conveying broader ideas around representation of women, our expectations of how women should appear in front of the camera, how their bodies are utilised or employed within the conventions of portraiture.

And the more you learn about the work, the deeper the interpretations get. Because this, for the artist, is a portrait also about infertility, and it's about dealing with the expectations around the conventions of being female, about our expectations of motherhood, the expectations that we should be a mother, and what happens when that is something that is not something that can be realised for you.

But I don't think you need to know that to appreciate the image. I think it's like a poem. It offers us clues and it's slightly ambiguous. It's definitely surreal. The presence of that floating shell is open to multiple interpretations, some of which I won't go into, and perhaps they're my own interpretations of the work.

But for me, this was the standout from the start.