Reflections and Award Winners from Exeter Contemporary Open 2025
Published November 11, 2025
Exeter Phoenix recently closed the door on another brilliant Exeter Contemporary Open (ECO), our annual exhibition celebrating some of the most exciting new contemporary art being created across the UK. Running from 12 Sep to 01 Nov 2025, this year’s exhibition brought together fourteen artists working across a diverse range of artistic practice, from painting and sculpture, to film, photography and textiles.
Now in its nineteenth year, ECO continues to play an important role in the South West’s cultural calendar, providing a platform for the careers of emerging artists.
Audience feedback described this year’s exhibition as “thought provoking and delightful,” “a great selection of work with strong relevant themes” and “better than the Tate Modern, visually and in passionate meanings behind all the works.” Thank you to each and every one of you who visited!
In this blog, we look back at the artists who made up this year’s exhibition, reflect on some of the feedback from our audiences, and highlight the award winners (Overall Awards and Audience Choice Award), who were recognised for their outstanding contributions to ECO 2025.
Featured Artists
This year’s artists were selected by Harriet Cooper (Director of The Burton at Bideford Art Gallery and Museum), Remi Rana-Allen (artist and educator), and Matt Burrows (Gallery Curator and Manager, Exeter Phoenix). From hundreds of national submissions, the panel selected fourteen artists whose work reflected the diversity and ambition of contemporary practice today.
Helen Acklam
Helen grew up in a coal mining valley in South Wales and is now based in Bristol. Through an embodied, site-specific practice, she makes sprawling connections between land and body, somatics (physical perception) and personal mythology.
Collaborating with the already-meaningful materials of the landscape – earth, coal and stone – she explores her identity as a mother without children, and the impact of culture and place on individuals, communities and land.
Stacey Allan
Stacey is a Surrey-based multi-disciplinary artist using sculpture, installation, video, and sound. Her work explores feminist world-building to address the everyday silencing of women through a whimsical, allegorical lens.
She draws influences from folk art, surrealism and science fiction to develop her own mythology of deities and imagined realms, where the overlooked stories of women are celebrated, and all women’s voices are heard.
Chris Alton - OVERALL AWARD WINNER #1
Chris is a Devon-born, Manchester-based artist whose practice includes socially engaged projects, video essays, textile banners, and publications.
Each of his projects addresses an array of interconnected social, political, economic and environmental concerns, including; public space, mythology, soft power, tax avoidance, hierarchies, Britain's colonial history, and climate justice, amongst others.
Yiduo Cheng - OVERALL AWARD WINNER #2
Yiduo is an interdisciplinary artist, based in London. Her practice seeks to uncover hidden and institutionalised structures, perceptions, and narratives within the chaos of contemporary social order, while challenging the anthropocentric and hierarchical paradigms that dominate our understanding of the world.
She explores the tension between viewing animals as autonomous beings versus commodified resources, a duality that mirrors broader ethical dilemmas in capitalism, ecology, and post-humanist philosophy. She interrogates the paradox of our dual roles as caretakers and predators, a dynamic that echoes colonial structures in which dominance is masked as benevolence.
Andy Cluer - OVERALL AWARD WINNER #3
Andy is a Devon based visual artist working in sound, sculpture and drawing. His practice explores relationships between different environments and human experiences, aiming to understand how we perceive and interact with the spaces we occupy, and how we have inflicted our presence on the land.
He intends to reveal new dimensions and possibilities within these environments, which may have otherwise gone unnoticed.
Mani Kambo
Mani is a multidisciplinary artist, based in Newcastle upon Tyne, whose practice is rooted a family history within the caste system. Influenced by her upbringing in a household filled with superstition, prayer and religious ceremony, she employs a variety of personal totemic symbols.
By layering and editing these images, she collages narratives and weaves dreamscapes, focusing on objects, routines and rituals distilled both from both the everyday and from mythology.
Kenji Lim - AUDIENCE CHOICE AWARD WINNER
Kenji is a Singapore-born British artist who works in sculpture, video, digital collage, installation, and painting. His work reflects and refracts the experience of the natural world through the prisms of culture, myth, philosophy, and the metaphysical. He attempts to shed the human way of seeing the world and think about what the world might look like through non-human eyes, those of another entity.
Our visitors particularly loved Cherbub - an angelic floating baby, hanging from a stream of its own glittering faeces. Its gaze challenges the viewer, meeting you as an equal of unfamiliar origin with huge unblinking eyes.
Giles Round
Giles is based in East Sussex and works across architecture, art and design. His work often plays out through open-ended projects in which exhibitions themselves become the medium, creating conceptual frameworks to interrogate the role of the artist as an agent of transformation.
Divya Sharma
is a London-based British Indian artist who works in tapestry to weave strands of myth, stories and culture around her mother tongue Tamil. She uses salvaged or constructed materials, often combining tufting with glass beads that catch and refract the light to explore imagined, hidden, forgotten and ignored stories.
Nancy Singh
Nancy is an academic and artist originally from India who now lives and works in Bristol. Working in photography, installation and film, she explores themes of gender, identity, race and culture, aiming to capture reimagined moments that come from a place of nostalgia, memory and experience.
Ross Taylor
Ross is a London based artist who, through painting, performance and making books, reveals an inner world of personal stories and fictional characters, while probing the ambiguity of the creative process itself.
On taking part in ECO 2025, Ross said: “I wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart for including my work and myself in such a brilliant show and part of a lovely experience. It genuinely was one of the most positive, friendly and best curated shows I've been part of. I had such a lovely few days in Exeter, all of the artists and the team at the Phoenix were so warm and lovely. A real testament to the Open itself.”
Sophie Wake
Sophie is a Devon-based painter and ceramicist who is influenced by shamanism, rock art, ancient clay models and pottery, and celebrates the power of raw basic human emotion in simple and authentic forms.
Her practice is guided instinctive and automatic process of deep self-enquiry that are suffused with spiritual practices of meditation and ceremony.
Charlotte Warne Thomas
Charlotte lives in London, UK. Her practice explores the relationships between labour, work and care to disrupt perceptions of value through a feminist lens.
She focuses on invisible labour, both of unpaid familial care by mothers* and of women artists, whose work continues to be overlooked and undervalued by a market-oriented art world. She probes the way these two inequalities intersect, the role of ‘love’ in both unpaid domestic care and (women) artists’ work, and the concepts of both reproductive and emotional labour.
Lily Wei
Lily is a Chinese-New Zealander who lives and works in London. Drawing on her experiences growing up between New Zealand and China, she explores themes of Third Culture identity - those who don't fully identify either with their parents' culture, or the culture of the place they live.
Her paintings aim to celebrate being part of the Asian diaspora, and to explore displacement, museum repatriation, movement and the (Welsh) concept of Hiraeth - or longing for home and identity.
From large-scale installations to intimate paintings, this years exhibition offered audiences the chance to engage with new perspectives and contemporary artistic experimentation.
We’d like to thank everyone who visited the exhibition, came along to a tour, or voted in the Audience Choice Award, and we look forward to returning with ECO 2026 next year.
Image credits: Dom Moore