Presented each year by the Royal Society of Sculptors (RSS), the Gilbert Bayes Award recognises the outstanding achievements of early-career sculptors, providing recipients with a year’s worth of professional support and society membership, as well as inclusion in a group exhibition. In 2025 the award recognised work on the theme of ‘Terraforming Futures – Sculpture, sustainability, and the shifting balance of nature’; the winners were Amanda Cornish, Beverley Duckworth, Bo-Yi Wu, Emmanuel Awuni, Lucy Mulholland, Madeleine Ruggi, Regan Boyce, Salvatore Pione, Stephen Burke and Yidan Kim.
The Gilbert Bayes Award Winners 2025 exhibition, presented by TM Gallery in London in collaboration with the RSS, was curated by Freeny Yianni, founder of CLOSE Gallery in Somerset and guest judge of the award. At TM Gallery on 11 February, Yianni spoke with Lucy Waterson from Apollo about sustainability in sculpture, the importance of the medium today and the role of the Gilbert Bayes Award in shaping how we might think about sculpture.
Yianni was first struck by a work of sculpture when she saw a piece by Anish Kapoor as a student in Barcelona. ‘It made me realise that sculpture [makes] a difference in the world when it’s in the public realm,’ she told the audience. Working with Kapoor and other artists during her time at Lisson Gallery in London, Yianni explained, consolidated her identity at a ‘nurturer of artists’, and in 2009 she founded CLOSE Gallery.
Sustainability, she said, has always been at the heart of the gallery’s ethos. This is evident not only in the recent exhibition at CLOSE, ‘After Nature’ – which travelled to Proposition gallery in Bethnal Green in London – but also in her development of the theme for this year’s Gilbert Bayes Award. ‘Terraforming Futures’, Yianni reflected, connects to ‘something we have been doing for millennia […] working with the earth and all that it gives us and all that it takes away’. She remarked on how each of the artists in the exhibition use material to explore a connection to the planet, ranging from Cornish’s towering sculpture made of mud sourced from the banks of the Thames to Pione’s twisting wooden sculpture and Ruggi’s steel work exploring industry and the infrastructure of ports.
Yianni also spoke about how art can be a tool for spreading hope about the future, and about the power of public sculpture to transform urban landscapes as a kind of ‘functionless architecture’ we can engage with in everyday life. She also had much to say about the political discourse that public sculpture can spark and how it can be a spur to innovation and progress. She commended the RSS for the work it does for early-career sculptors through initiatives such as the Gilbert Bayes Award and by encouraging young artists to refine their work through trial and error. ‘If we don’t keep experimenting,’ she pointed out, ‘the world becomes very dull.’
For those wanting to learn more about Yianni’s work and the Gilbert Bayes Award, the full talk can be viewed here. The exhibition of the winners’ work runs at TM Gallery until 11 March.
