Tannery Arts, Unit 1b, New Tannery Way Bermondsey, SEl 5WS, London
The inaugural exhibition of the fifth edition of the Jerwood/Photoworks Awards is opening this January 2026 at Drawing Room | Tannery Arts!
Join us to celebrate Roman Manfredi and Sayuri Ichida, who received a £15,000 award each (comprising £10,000 fee and £5,000 production budget) with a full package of support from Photoworks and guest mentors to create new work over a 12-month period.
Roman’s work titled TRA exists in the liminal, hinting at transformation, motion without destination. It speaks to a state of being between, among, and within, an energetic space where masculine and feminine converge and dissolve, where categories blur into something more elemental. Using still and moving images, portraits, film and fragments, Roman journeys through Napoli, where the landscape is caught between time periods and the relationship between people, personal identity and place is intuitive, felt, embodied, and ancient.
Ichida’s work, 空席 (Kūseki), meaning “empty seats”, addresses Japan’s rapid population decline, with rural communities among the hardest hit. Between 2002 and 2020, nearly 9,000 schools closed, with around 450 more shutting down each year. As birth rates fall and towns shrink, schools, once central to daily life, stand empty, their presence quietly fading from the landscape. The presentation of Kūseki spans across photography, collage, sound and sculptural installation in an effort to respond to this ongoing disappearance.
Launched in 2015, the Jerwood/Photoworks Awards are a biennial major commissioning opportunity open to all UK based artists using photography and within the first ten years of their career. The Jerwood/Photoworks Awards offer the awardees the opportunity to make ambitious new work and significantly develop their practice at a pivotal moment in their career. Previous recipients have included Joanne Coates, Heather Agyepong, Silvia Rosi, Theo Simpson, Alejandra Carles-Tolra, Sam Laughlin, Lúa Ribeira, Matthew Finn, Joanna Piotrowska and Tereza Zelenková.
