Each year the Royal Academy of Arts presents a number of significant prizes for outstanding works within the Summer Exhibition. Over £50,000 is offered in awards and prizes for every category of work in the exhibition, including sculpture, architecture, drawing, works on paper, painting, photography and prints.

This year the prestigious £25,000 Charles Wollaston Award has been won by Mike Nelson RA for Untitled (Public Sculpture for a Redundant Space). Established in 1978 and presented to the “most distinguished work” in the exhibition, it is one of the most significant art prizes awarded in the UK. The judges for this year’s award were Rebecca Warren RA, Richard Riley and Honorary Fellow, Marina Warner.

Nelson’s winning work is a prototype for a series of three works made on site for the High Line in New York. The High Line is a former elevated railway line that fed the industries of the western edge of Manhattan. Long defunct, along with most of the industries that thrived in the area, it is now a leafy, manicured walkway that overlooks the redevelopment of these former factories and warehouses. In New York, the rubble which fills the sleeping bags was taken from these sites; at the RA, the sculpture contains debris from a site local to Nelson’s London studio.

Other prizes include the Jack Goldhill Award for sculpture, won by Kate MccGwire for Squall, and the Turkishceramics Grand Award for Architecture, won by Matthew Bloomfield for The Parliamentary Campus of God’s Own Country.

Erdem Cenesiz, Chairman of Turkishceramics, said Bloomfield’s architectural model “successfully demonstrates how architecture can simultaneously act as a singular building and a piece of urban infrastructure”.

The British Institution Awards for Students
The British Institution Fund was established to promote excellence in the arts through the awarding of prizes to students. Work is assessed across a comprehensive range of creative disciplines from painting to architecture. Two prizes have been awarded this year by the trustees.
£5,000 Prize: Sofia Mitsola, Fitting
£3,000 Prize: Jerome Ng, Memoirs of a Hospice Care Home; Section

The Hugh Casson Drawing Prize
£5,000 for an original work on paper in any medium, where the emphasis is clearly on drawing.
Mark Beesley, Mock Tudor

The Rose Award for Photography
£1,000 for a photograph or series of photographs.
Oli Kellett, Cross Road Blues (LA)

The Sunny Dupree Family Award for a Woman Artist
£4,000 for a painting or sculpture.
Geraldine Swayne, Silver Swans Ballet Corps

The Arts Club Award
£2,500 awarded to an artist aged 35 or under for a work in any medium except architecture.
Oli Kellett, Cross Road Blues (LA) (Cat no. 683)

London Original Print Fair Prize
£2,500 awarded for a print in any medium.
Ade Adesina, Flat Line (Twenty Sixteen) (Gravity) (Secrets of the Sand) (Triptych)