We are delighted to announce that Toby Paterson RSA (Elect), Jessica Kirkpatrick and Lorna McIntosh RSA have each received one of major funding awards.
The 2025 RSA William Littlejohn Award, which grants £2,000 for excellence and innovation in water-based media, has been awarded to Toby Paterson RSA (Elect). Based in Glasgow, Paterson explores the spaces we inhabit, drawing on the visual language of architecture and our built environment. He plans to use the award to develop a new body of paintings that will focus on Glasgow’s ever-evolving landscape.
He notes that he has ‘a particular interest in points of spatial, social and infrastructural connection and, by contrast, with Glasgow’s many correlating points of severance. The opportunity to focus once more on my immediate environment with the objective of developing an extensive new body of paintings is a tantalising prospect.’
Jessica Kirkpatrick, Cutting Ties
Jessica Kirkpatrick, the recipient of the 2025 RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Travel Award, will receive £5,000 to carry out the research, development and production of a new body of work through a period of international travel.
Kirkpatrick approaches painting as both a spiritual and sensory experience, combining symbol and form, geometry and gesture to access her feminine creative process. She will use the award to travel to Teotihuacán, Mexico, where she will take part in a ‘Power Journey’ led by a Swedish shaman initiated into the Toltec tradition.
She said: ‘The artwork produced from this research shall invite my viewer to challenge their perception of reality…This journey reflects my commitment to deploying art to soften a world broken by war, tyranny and ecological despair. I seek to deepen my own artistic capacity for tenderness, authenticity, connection and care.’
Lorna McIntosh RSA, Cut
The £5,000 RSA Academician Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Travel Award, which has been awarded to Lorna McIntosh RSA, enables a Royal Scottish Academician that is a committed fine art painter to carry out the research, development and production of a new body of work through a period of international travel.
McIntosh’s current work explores altered and false forms, relating the metamorphosis of motherhood to the metamorphosis and duplicity in minerals, archaeological sites and other areas. She will use the award funds to travel to Herculaneum, Italy, and the Palace of Knossos, Greece, two sites that were subject to major ‘reconstitutions’ involving concrete during their excavation.
She notes that: ‘Some of the interventions were necessary structurally, but a lot were fanciful. I am interested in separating the modern interventions from the ruins, the fakery from the fact. A reinterpretation of a reimagining.’
We are honoured to enable these significant awards on behalf of William Littlejohn RSA, Dame Elizabeth Blackadder RSA, her husband John Houston RSA and the RSA Blackadder Houston Bequest.
