Awards winners

We’re delighted to announce the winning submissions for Touchlines of Fortitude’s open-call exhibition.

Congratulations to all the winners, but a huge thank you to everyone who submitted work. Your stories of female strength and resilience – and the way you’ve used your passion and creativity to express and amplify those tales in so many different ways and forms – have truly inspired us.

Winners were selected by a panel including leading art critic Tabish Khan , award-winning figurative artist Karen Turner, curator Agnieszka Lokaj and The Beach gallery owner Mark Vellacott

Thank you to Hobbycraft and Karen Turner for kindly sponsoring Touchlines of Fortitude prizes:

Hobbycraft vouchers

plus

Kindly donated by Karen Turner:

• The Strategy Reset worth

• The Art of Instagram Premium

Winners are:

========== DRAWING: HILLARY EMETUCHE ========

@emetuche_hillary // hillaryemetuche.com

CATEGORY: Charcoal and Graphite

TITLE: Drawing of Ezinne

Hillary is a multidisciplinary artist who expresses through the dusts of charcoal, graphite and photography. Hillary's journey as an artist began from childhood when he discovered that he was gifted by the hands and could draw exceptionally well and better than his peers. Hillary painstakingly developed his abilities through the medium of charcoal and graphite, through years of practice, learning and unlearning. His journey through personal development has seen him master and still honing the principles of light and shadow. 

Hillary's degree in Civil Engineering and Masters in International Project Management has not bridged his passion for creativity, instead he has found ways to reflect and connect the dots. Hillary has been featured on the BBC in his local Nigerian dialect Igbo focusing in a work he did in 2018, titled Asusu, and also featured on the Telegraph's Artist and Illustrators Magazine. Ultimately, Hillary believes that everyone is unique  and has been born with a freely-given gift to serve humanity. His vision is to inspire these great hidden potentials that are in-built.

Love and kindness abound in every woman.

========== MONOPRINT: HANZHI ZONG ==========

@hanzi_415 // hanzart.com

CATEGORY: Monoprint on Paper

TITLE: Internal Censor

Yes, I have participated in several art exhibitions focused on female empowerment, such as those organized by the Ladies Drawing Club in London and Chapel Arts Studios in Andover. I enjoy sharing my personal story and identity as a woman through my work. Many of my pieces explore themes of female awakening and self-growth, which align closely with the exhibition’s focus on female resilience.

Hanzhi Zhong (b. 1999) is a Chinese artist based in London. She completed her MA in Illustration at Kingston University and has developed a distinctive style in fine arts and illustration. While her practice often explores themes of life, death, and human emotions, her recent work increasingly reflects on resilience, empowerment, and personal transformation—drawing inspiration from lived experiences and the strength found in overcoming challenges. Working across painting, printmaking, animation, and sculpture, Hanzhi creates intimate yet powerful narratives that merge the fragility of the human form with its inner fortitude. Often incorporating skeletal imagery, she describes her approach as “stripping away the flesh to touch the shape of the soul.” Her work invites viewers to contemplate both vulnerability and strength, celebrating the quiet yet profound ways individuals—particularly women—persist, heal, and grow.

Internal Censor is a series of monoprints created by Hanzhi Zhong in 2023 that explores the complex emotional landscape of internal struggle. Inspired by a transformative period marked by anxiety and personal challenges, the works reveal the often overlooked battles within—demonstrating enduring strength amid vulnerability. The artist believes that everyone possesses a silent courage and resilience necessary to persist and heal through adversity; we only need to recognize the powerful strength already present within ourselves. Drawing inspiration from somatization, the series visualizes how emotional turmoil manifests physically, highlighting the intimate connection between mind and body.

========== PHOTOGRAPHY: CODY CHOI (BOUNCY) ==========

@codysmoving // codychoi.com

CATEGORY: Photography 

TITLE: Miss Bouncy

​Cody’s extensive experience as a dancer is equal to his acclaim as a modern photographer. He has shot for Samsung TV, Ben Sherman, Affordable Art Fair in Hong Kong, Singapore and London, and Saatchi Art in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London and Bristol. He has also been featured in London TV, Samsung TV, Time Out, Aesthetica Magazine, Metro Newspaper, the Evening Standard, and more.

Cody Choi is a contemporary photographer and choreographer known for his stunning figurative portraits of dancers. Born in Hong Kong and a dancer himself, Cody captures the dynamism and passion of his subjects with an expert eye. Cody’s work is funded by the Arts Council England, as well as commissioned by the Royal Opera House, Greenwich Dance London and exhibited globally.

Cody graduated in Modern Dance in 2000 from The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, where he received the Jackie Chan Scholarship twice. Cody was then awarded a full scholarship to join the Transitions Dance Company at Laban in London. He has a breadth of international performing experience, including 3 international touring seasons with Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake as well as the English National Opera and the Royal National Theatre.   This has no doubt provided the artist with the photographic reflexes and perception required to apprehend and seize the trajectory of his dancers as they glide through urban and suburban landscapes.

She’s been hitting hard mentally and physically, but she hangs on! When the world get to you and beat you up so suddenly that you don’t even have time to react, but you try your best to hang on.Things will get better eventually!

========== WRITING: CLAUDI PIRIPIPPI (BORGNA)  ===========

Born in Germany and raised in Italy, my academic formation developed between Italy, the UK and the US but my cultural experience could not be complete without the knowledge gathered from nature and an itinerant lifestyle in the pursuit of art and love.

A fellow artists of several A.I.R. programmes I’m a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Grant, the Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Grant, the Royal British Society of Sculptors Bursary Award and the Pritzker Foundation Endowed Fellowship Award. Voted the Public Speaks Winner for the Broomhill National Sculpture Prize, short-listed for the BBC2 documentary School of Saatchi, judges personal favourite and commended for the British Women Artist’s Prize. More recently the recipient of the Maryland Federation of Art Juror’s Choice, digital Art finalist for the Women United Art Movement Art Prize and digital finalist for the Amedeo Modigliani Prize.

Since graduating from Suzanne Lacy’s Public Practice MFA programme, my work has taken a radical feminist turn leading into the meanders of my fluid-eco-glitch-femininity. Currently searching for possible connections between the conceptual and spiritual, I am interested in where and how these two realms meet in art.  Whilst my art practice might well be my very own emancipatory process woven into the environmental crisis, I voice myself through video, performance and interactive poetry. My first book...and they lived happily ever after....was published

========== YARN ART: JESSICA OZLO ====================

@jessicaozlo //  jessicaozlo.com

CATEGORY: Textile

TITLE: Sedimentos

I have exhibited my work internationally in cities including Paris, Madrid, Salzburg, London and St Albans, participating in both gallery shows and art fairs. My practice has also been developed through an artist residency in Barcelona and has been featured in print publications. I maintain an active studio practice that bridges textile and painting, and my work continues to be shown in diverse cultural contexts across Europe.

Jessica Ozlo is a Spanish-born visual artist whose work bridges textiles and painting, blending structured craft with intuitive, fluid forms. She discovered her passion for fibre arts while studying Fashion Design in Barcelona, later earning a Master’s degree in Costume Design from the London College of Fashion. After several years working in film and theatre, she shifted her focus to art in 2020. Since then, she has exhibited in Madrid, London, Paris, and Salzburg, with her work held in private collections across Europe and North America.

At the core of her practice is a commitment to slow, embodied making that honours the history of women’s labour through techniques such as weaving, crochet, macramé, knitting, and sewing. While grounded in these traditional crafts, Ozlo intentionally breaks away from rigid patterns, embracing improvisation and spontaneity to create organic, evolving forms. 

This dynamic tension between structure and freedom reflects her background in painting, where intuition and chance shape form and rhythm. Through this balance of respect for heritage and openness to experimentation, Ozlo transforms craft into a contemporary language, creating work that bridges past and present while restoring cultural value and creative expression.

As a female artist working in craft, my practice is built on persistence. It is sustained by the daily act of showing up in the studio and committing to slow processes that demand both patience and physical presence. This endurance is not about a single moment of strength but about the quiet repetition of gestures that accumulate over time.

Sedimentos is part of a series in which I explore the meeting point between the fluid qualities of my painting practice and the structured nature of textile work. This piece was created through a process of layering and hand construction using crochet. I intentionally broke away from the regularity of traditional crochet patterns, allowing the work to flow and form in unexpected ways. It reflects the resilience found in continuing a practice despite its demands, and the strength that emerges from the meeting of intention and accumulated labour.

========== PAINTING: MAHA  =============

@smahaart // www.smahaart.co.uk

CATEGORY: Overall winner

TITLE: Monthly conversation

Maha is a London based artist. With a past in Finance consulting, she has developed her painting practice over the last decade to an advanced level. Focused on composition, shapes and juxtapositions, she principally explores atypical viewpoints and close-range angles with her paintings. 

Largely figurative and narrative driven, Maha works with oil paints for the malleability and depth it offers. With her more recent series ‘Vanishing Point’ Maha captures tender, sensitive postures that hands assume in our everyday. The paintings aim to collectively create a strong point about the invisibility of women after a certain stage in their lives. 

Emphatically anonymous, Maha builds the narrative of the series by painting these hands as an anatomical landing point of the strength and solidarity of these women. She chooses to leave out the gaze of the women in the painting, giving the viewer the opportunity to consider the idea of the vanishing point.

Documenting her journey as a mother, Maha spends her time sketching and painting her son creating a collaboration between her work and her personal life. Keenly painting dogs for over 6 years, Maha thinks her dog paintings are not about likeness or portraiture. She believes painting dogs as a compositional exercise elevates what is often brushed off

as a rudimentary pursuit in the current world, that sometimes over intellectualises art. Her

compositions are created using found reference images and extending these to complete the anatomical details and the backgrounds.

She is a keen reader and follows the lives and work of many women artists that percolates into her subjects and compositions; particularly interested in the synergies and conflicts owing to the inter-twined co-existence of domestic and individual threads in their lives.

After qualifying as a Chartered Accountant and working as a bank consultant for what seemed like an endless number of years, Maha went back to college to study painting at Saint Martin’s UAL. (Largely self-taught, she has completed advanced painting courses with Roger Gill at the University.) Typically working at her home studio most days of the week, Maha is also a resident artist at the Mansion Beckenham Place Park artists collective.

Part of a series that gives an opportunity to talk about women and the limitlessness of their strength. Fortitudes flow faster and further during and despite the monthly conversations we have with our bodies. From a set of work about the invisibility of women after a certain stage in their lives, this painting is a piece that brings forth the thought that biological essentialisms are our super powers and not a limitation. I have attempted to express such invisibility by capturing tender, strong, utilitarian poses that hands take in everyday situations, conveying the story that is often left out. Emphatically anonymous, the poses are codes, signifying a dilemma, a drama, a decision or a responsibility, a reward, a regret. And a nod to how women forge ahead as naturally as these hands.

========== Ceramics: YIYI SONG =============================

@yiyisong.a

CATEGORY: Ceramics

TITLE: Soft Unfolding

In 2025, my ceramic work has been featured in several curated exhibitions focused on resilience, transformation, and material storytelling. I participated in Undercurrent (Batsford Gallery, London), a multidisciplinary show exploring emotional and psychological undercurrents in contemporary life.

My work has been selected for Everything Then is Now, an upcoming group exhibition during the 2025 London Design Festival, reflecting on time, identity, and change. 

I was also included in the Tarpey Gallery Open 2025 (30 Aug – 19 Oct), a major contemporary art exhibition in the East Midlands showcasing both emerging and established UK-based artists. Held at one of the region’s foremost commercial galleries, it features a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, ceramics, and installation.

These experiences reflect my ongoing practice rooted in subtle resilience, material nuance, and the embodied narratives of women’s lives.

Song Yiyi is a ceramic-based artist currently living in London. Her practice stems from a long-term inquiry into the body, memory, and familial relationships. Through hand-built clay forms and decorative gestures, she explores the emotional and sensory dimensions embedded in everyday objects.

With a background in fashion design, Song brings a cross-disciplinary sensibility to her work, merging material sensitivity with embodied female experience. Her forms often resist symmetry or function, unfolding through cracks, folds, and quiet imbalances. These gestures evoke a kind of soft resilience that is shaped not by domination but by care, vulnerability, and adaptation.

Her works unfold in both studio and community-based contexts, forming interactive dialogues between people, materials, and spaces. She is currently working on a personal project titled Vessels in Migration, which gently but purposefully bridges craft and narrative, drawing on her own lived experience of migration and womanhood.

She holds an MA in Applied Imagination from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Recent exhibitions include Undercurrent (Batsford Gallery, London), Tarpey Gallery Open 2025 (East Midlands), and Everything Then is Now (upcoming, London Design Festival 2025).

In all her work, Song seeks to offer alternative forms of strength. These are curved, cracked, and held together by relationship. She approaches clay not only as a material but as a language of resilience.

Soft Unfolding explores the quiet resilience found in the everyday lives of women. Formed through hand-building and slow, intuitive gestures, the sculpture unfolds in a way that resembles skin or petals. It appears fragile, yet remains grounded and enduring.

The uneven glaze and areas of exposed clay reveal the marks of process. These details echo the imperfect but persistent journey of adaptation, care, and emotional labour. The work is inspired by the artist’s experience of migration, identity shift, and transformation. 

It speaks of a softness that holds strength, shaped through acts of folding, holding, and staying open. Much like moments of recovery in sport or the pause between movements, Soft Unfolding honors a form of resilience that is embodied, quiet, and deeply felt.

========== SCULPTURE: RACHAEL DOBLE ================================

https://rachaeldoble.com

CATEGORY: Sculpture (mixed media): mirror and glass

TITLE: The light within to transcendent with each tread

With 30 years in commercial design, fine art, fashion, and textile design, Rachael is known for bold ideas and instinct-led work. Her practice blends conceptual depth with playful invention. A graduate of Central Saint Martins, she has exhibited three times at the Royal Academy and been shortlisted twice.

Based in Wiltshire, her work encompasses sculptural, painted, or hand-drawn art. Driven by a perpetual imagination, her work journeys into the collective unconscious, a source she continues to draw from building a rich, unfolding body of work. Led by inquiry, with an inquisitive, intuitive mindset and a deep connection to sound and colour, her practice explores themes of repetition, nature, and the bolder conceptual questions of what, why, and how. Her work is driven by a desire to spark feeling, conversation, and connection in everyone who encounters it.

Alongside her studio practice, she balances an award-winning textile design business of 15 years, known for its originality, craftsmanship, and detail at Carminelake.com

This piece, a mirror mosaic rugby boot, was created as a reflection on resilience, transformation, and endurance. I wanted it to embody the words ‘women rise, persist, endure, and transform.’ qualities that I see as both powerful and quietly passive, strong yet deeply calm. Rugby and Womens sport, often linked with toughness and collective strength, here becomes a vessel for something more spiritual, an object that asks what resilience might look like when turned inward, when it is about survival, reflection, and transformation rather than only physical force.

By covering the boot in mirrors, I invite the viewer to see themselves within the work. The mirrors fracture and multiply the gaze, creating distortion as well as clarity, reminding us that resilience reshapes us in ways that are not always linear or predictable. The boot holds both light and shadow, offering fragments of reflection that speak to endurance and the beauty of transformation.

My work is driven by a desire to spark feeling, conversation, and connection in those who encounter it. I draw on spirituality, repetition, sound, and colour to create pieces that invite reflection and ask bigger questions of what, why, and how. For me, this sculpture is not just about sport or strength, but about the quieter endurance women carry — resilience that transforms, reflects, and endures in every sense. To reflect light inwardly, nurturing one’s inner strength, while enduring outwardly the challenges the world presents. A testament to the enduring courage of women.