Year 10 Art Scholar wins Young Artists’ Prize at local exhibition

We are extremely proud of our Year 10 Art Scholar, Trinity, who was recently awarded first place in the Young Artists’ Prize for 16-18 year olds at the Royal Commonwealth Society Bath & District Branch Artists’ Prize and Exhibition 2026 at 44AD artspace.

With over 100 artists, including 17 of our Art Scholars,  responding to the theme ‘Enchantment, Mystery & Illusion in the Commonwealth’, the exhibition showcased the imagination and technical skill of creatives across the BA region.

Trinity was presented with her award by the Mayor of Bath and it means that she has secured an exhibition for the school at the gallery at a future date.

Trinity said: 

For this art piece I was quite inspired by the mythological beast of the Qilin 麒麟 from Chinese folklore. Being a legendary chimerical beast with antlers and a body partially scaled and shaped like a horse or a goat. However, I wanted to add a more biological flair to the beast, to represent the often warped and more ‘grotesque’ parts of nature that the legendary cryptids often do not portray, as can be seen from the light veins that dot its body or the ribs that emerge from its stretched skin. Essentially, I wanted to understand how a creature like this could realistically exist, apart from its more magical identity, making it less so of a legendary entity like a unicorn or wyvern that would have adaptations that made no sense, and more so of an actual animal that could potentially exist, including the more scary or uncanny parts of an animal that humans so rarely covet. 

Head of Art, Hannah Wilson said: 

I am so proud of all the creative responses made by our students inspired by the theme of Enchantment, Mystery & Illusion. The challenge was to interpret this theme in a personal way whilst exploring a technique or process that showed off your chosen creative skill. Trinity really connected intuitively with this theme and used drawing as a creative tool to describe how this creature may appear. In a world of AI generated images, it is a wonderful celebration of the human imagination and the artists hand and a reminder of the continued value of this approach to develop ideas.