Jemma Appleby wins Helen Putler Art Prize 2025

We are pleased to announce that the Helen Putler Art Prize for 2025 has been awarded to Jemma Appleby with #1010525, a two-metre-tall sheet of paper containing 'a drawing still in progress'.

In the words of Geoff Dunlop, curator of SCREENPLAY, the exhibition which featured Appleby's artwork:

“First impressions of Jemma Appleby’s exquisite work can be confusing. Are these photographs, prints or paintings? They are in fact charcoal drawings. And the more closely you study them the more puzzling the experience becomes. Are they buildings or pure geometry? Are they states of emotion or of mind? Or are they quite simply an evocation of the sublime - with just a tinge of menace?

Appleby describes spaces of tranquility, serenity, peace and even transformation, in her charcoal drawings of compelling beauty. The density of their deep blacks has the lustre of fur yet the granularity of coal dust. The subtlety of so many and varied greys can make you think of the many and varied words the Inuit have for snow.”

Appleby's work has been selected by visitors to Fringe Arts Bath Festival 2025, as this year's recipient of the prize which was set up in memory of Helen Putler by some of her close friends "as a way of remembering our dear friend Helen Putler, who would always be at FaB opening nights and supported (and worked for) many of the independent institutions in the Arts in Bath."

Discover more about Appleby & her work, the prize and hoe to get involved on their respective websites:

The FaB team would like to say a huge thank you to Helen’s nearest and dearest for creating the Helen Putler Arts Prize, and supporting FaB’s artists.

Congratulations to the other Artists & Curators whose works also received votes (out of 200+ artists exhibiting at FaB Festival 2025), as follows:

Emma Fordham - Map of Mells
Eric Drass - Ludwig Wittgenstein
Rosie Fennell - The Butchery
Marko Dutka - The Murmuration
Ethan Pennell - The Dartmoor Folklore Map
Louise Campion - Paper Fashion ft. the Holburne Museum’s ‘Make it New’ Artists