Matthew Woosnam is the winner of the Christ’s College Art Prize 2026 with a sculpture called 'Wedi’i ailgylchu' which is the Welsh word for recycled.
The theme for this year’s prize was ‘Repair’ and Matthew, carpenter in the Maintenance Department, retrieved a piece of York stone from Second Court when a section of the path was replaced in order to create the sculpture.
Matthew says that, for him, a common repair is that created by a ripple when the surface of water is broken.
He said:
“I have tried to recreate a ripple, not in its full form as I wanted to retain the broken edge of stone. Which is the reason that I came to find the slab in the first place. Repairs can fix what is broken and sometimes reveal a new purpose for the broken item.”
The sculpture, which was created using a hammer and chisel, will be placed by the College swimming pool.
The runner-up is undergraduate Eliana Dyer-Fernandes’s 'Shared Ground', a photograph taken in Verona that depicts the labour of maintenance workers repairing an amphitheatre.
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Chair of the Visual Arts Committee, Assistant Professor Kareem Estefan said:
“Thank you to the students and staff who contributed especially strong submissions this year, to the members of the College’s Visual Arts Committee who did the judging, to the Christ’s College Art Collective for proposing the theme of repair, and to Martin Johnson for the generous donation that makes this annual prize possible.”