Dissertation prize winners 2025
Meet the winners of our 2025 prize for writing on sculpture.
Through our annual Dissertation Prize, we encourage research and writing that explores sculpture in its most expansive form. We present two awards for outstanding BA and MA dissertations focused on contemporary, modern, or historical sculpture, with a prize of 拢250 for each.
Submissions to this year’s prize included essays that examined the preservation of bronze sculptures, the depiction of widows, diasporic biographies, and those that explored sculpture through quilting, dissent, absurdity, heritage, and more.
This year we’ve given the awards to Natasha Alexander (York St John University) and Alice Boot (University of Leeds). Find out more about their chosen topics below.
MA dissertation prize winner
Natasha Alexander
York St John University, MA Critical Studies
Doris Salcedo’s Work of Mourning
Alexander鈥檚 thesis considers Doris Salcedo鈥檚 artistic practice alongside Jaques Derrida鈥檚 writing, positioning her practice as a work of mourning with a continuous temporality that exists within and beyond predetermined narratives and contexts. She uses Hubert Damisch鈥檚 and Mieke Bal鈥檚 analysis of the artwork as a theoretical object to establish the material methods Salcedo deploys to frame viewers as witnesses to and participants in a work that is always in becoming.
BA dissertation prize winner
Alice Boot
University of Leeds, BA Fine Art
Familiar Threads: Thinking with Magdalena Abakanowicz and her Abakans, Artist to Artist
Boot鈥檚 thesis draws on the post-critical theories of Rita Felsky, who argues for a new type of critique which allows emotion into its domain, as a way of understanding the relationship between themself, as a fan, and the artist, Magdalena Abakanowicz.
Find out more
Want to learn more about about our annual dissertation prize? Find answers to commonly asked questions and information about how to apply for next year’s prize on our website.