JMPP 2025
Safehold , Oil and phosphorescent pigment on canvas, 18cm x 24cm, 2025
About 'Safehold'
We exist in a state of flux, caught between nostalgia for a more innocent past and the complexities of the present: political instability, environmental crisis, information overload, and the rise of AI.
‘Safehold’ explores our longing for security and refuge. Our lives our lived in a state of duality: one shaped by physical experience, the other by our inner emotional, mental, and spiritual reflection. It is this unseen inner world that I seek to make visible through the metaphorical use of landscape.
Using phosphorescent pigment, ‘Safehold’ shifts between two states. When viewed in light, it reflects our fragility within an uncertain world. In darkness, a luminous geometric structure emerges. The work invites viewers to reflect on our intrinsic need for resolution, both physical and mental, amid the shifting realities of today’s world.
The Prize provides a platform for artists to inspire, disrupt and challenge the British painting scene today. Showcasing the very latest in painting across the UK, the competition culminates in a major exhibition every two years in Liverpool.
First held in 1957, the competition was named after its founding sponsor Sir John Moores. The prize is open to all artists working with paint, who are aged 18 years or over and live or are professionally based in the UK.
Past prizewinners have included Peter Doig, Rose Wylie, David Hockney, Mary Martin, Graham Crowley and Sir Peter Blake.
In-Focus Article by Deborah Grice 2026
WINNER OF JOHN MOORES PAINTING PRIZE 'VISITORS' CHOICE AWARD'
My painting isn’t about me; it is about us.
Nostalgia for our shared history sits at the centre of my visual world, though not in a sentimental sense. Instead, it acts as an anchor, grounding me and providing a sense of safety that allows past and present to coexist and, perhaps paradoxically, enables me to imagine a future-facing artistic vision. This relationship between time, memory, and belonging underpins my practice, which, while informed by Victorian aesthetics, is shaped by two principal influences.
'Future Nostalgia', 2024, Oil, gold and phosphorescent pigment on canvas, 30cm x 40cm
'Future Nostalgia - Glow', 2024, Oil, gold and phosphorescent pigment on canvas, 30cm x 40cm
The first is a profound awareness of emptiness and absence rooted from my earliest existence. Born as an unexpected twin, I grew up with the persistent sensation of occupying a space slightly outside the family nucleus, a feeling that lingered long after infancy and fostered a sensitivity to distance, loneliness, and the desire for belonging. These emotions intensified following my diagnosis with a complex autoimmune condition a year after leaving the Royal College of Art. For the next fifteen years, I watched friends and peers advance in their careers while I spent my days visiting my father in his care home, watching as he succumbed to early-onset dementia. Yet these experiences were not wasted; they became reservoirs of lived knowledge. Through grief and hardship, I discovered hope, tenacity, and a sustained desire to thrive.
Secondly, and running parallel to my inner landscape is the physical one of rural East Yorkshire, where I grew up. Its expansive views and distinctive skies have always resonated deeply with my internal world, reinforcing a sense of scale, exposure, and emotional openness that continues to inform my work. This connection was further shaped when, at the age of eleven, I encountered the work of John Martin. Since then, the philosophy and aesthetics of nineteenth-century British Romantic landscape painters have repeatedly offered me a form of escapism. They understood atmosphere as something almost physical. Their paintings do not describe emotion so much as generate it.
By appropriating familiar visual tropes from this tradition, those motifs we recognise from biscuit tins and notelets, I invite the viewer into a sense of recognition and ease. These elements may recall certain techniques, colour palettes, or compositional strategies, but I do not intend for the viewer to remain there. Within the scene, I introduce subtle interruptions, geometric forms, voids, and lines that feel imposed rather than organic. These interventions destabilise the image just enough to create friction, a moment where the eye hesitates and certainty slips away. They are not symbols to be decoded, but visible manifestations of emotional tension.
'All Our Truths’, 2026, Oil and gold on canvas, 80cm x 100cm
This sense of interruption captures both the complexity of human emotional experience and the conditions that define contemporary life. In 2026, we live surrounded by systems that shape our experience quietly and invisibly. Algorithms filter what we see, automation predicts our choices, and artificial intelligence generates images, text, and answers at a speed that feels both miraculous and unsettling. While these systems promise efficiency and control, they also generate anxiety, displacement, and a diffusion of authorship and presence. The disruptions within my paintings echo this condition, appearing within the landscape as reminders that unseen forces are shaping how we perceive the world.
It is important to stress that the inclusion of graphic elements in my work is never contrived. Geometry entered my visual lexicon from an early age. My grandfather was an aeronautical engineer during WWII, and my father excelled at technical drawing, so blueprints, tools, and technical illustrations formed part of my early visual environment. I also responded instinctively to the visual contrasts around my home, silhouetted iron barns against flat open fields, cylindrical and cuboidal hay bales stacked in pyramids, and most memorably, the ‘golf balls’ at RAF Fylingdales in North Yorkshire. These now-extinct giant radomes, once used by the UK and US governments as an early-warning system for ballistic missile attacks, likely initiated my language of imposed visual dissonance within the genre of landscape painting.
'Where We Hope V ‘, 2026, Oil and phosphorescent pigment on canvas, 80cm x 100cm
‘Where We Hope V - Glow‘, 2026, Oil and phosphorescent pigment on canvas, 80cm x 100cm
This relationship to structure and space was further reshaped later in life when I gained my Private Pilot’s Licence. Aeronautical charts map airspace as a series of three-dimensional forms, cuboids, trapeziums, and cylinders, overlaying rigid systems onto open space. Viewing the landscape from above produces a sense of both understanding and dislocation. Boundaries and lines exist everywhere around us, unseen until we learn the language that allows them to emerge.
These ideas coalesce in Safehold, the painting that was awarded the 2025 John Moores Painting Prize Visitor’s Choice Award, which explores our desire for security in a world that often feels precarious. Trees and a rudimentary tent suggest the most basic form of shelter, yet the scene remains exposed, vulnerable to unseen forces. My aim to develop a visual language to describe ‘future’ and to express inner resilience led me to spend two years experimenting with phosphorescent pigment. Owing to my use of this pigment, Safehold exists in a state of transformation. By day, muted tones convey vulnerability and uncertainty. By night, a luminous geometric structure emerges, inviting reflection on our capacity for self-reliance and endurance. It is my intention that this humble painting offers a meditation on fragility, persistence, and hope.
'Safehold', 2025, Oil and phosphorescent pigment on canvas, 18cm x 24cm
It is my opinion that the pursuit of painting in the twenty-first century can feel out of step with the current pace of the world, but I see it’s inherent slowness as its strength. In a culture dominated by speed, screens, automation, and artificial intelligence, taking time to look becomes a quietly radical act. Spending time with a painting, whether creating or observing it, is an act of presence, and presence is something technology cannot replicate. Not only is being the recipient of the Visitor’s Choice Award, much appreciated, it is deeply meaningful as it affirms that people still seek this kind of encounter. It suggests that people are drawn to connection over spectacle or immediacy, seeking opportunities to engage not only with the image, but with themselves within it.
My painting isn’t about me; it is about us: Our past, and our future.