The Blue Towel depicts the artist, Liz Barratt, in three different poses: Euan Uglow made numerous drawings of her in his studio in the summer and autumn of 1982. The three poses depicted relate to her habit of collecting a towel, having a shower, and leaving, when she stayed at Turnchapel Mews, where Uglow lived and worked.

Euan Uglow was shortlisted for the first Jerwood Painting Prize in 1994.

John Piper has used a variety of materials to create the collage in this work including illustrations of shells from scientific textbooks and newsprint taken from the New Statesman, for which he wrote articles. Seven Sisters Cliff is situated near Eastbourne on the Sussex coast and for a period in the early 1930s Piper rented Rose Cottage at the edge of Rye Harbour.

This bold and rare self-portrait was painted around 1913 when Dora Carrington was almost at the end of her time at the Slade School of Fine Art. She was considered to be one of the most talented students of her generation which included many of the key names of 20th century British art such as Stanley Spencer, David Bomberg, William Roberts, Mark Gertler, Christopher Nevinson, Paul Nash and others.

There are very few known self-portraits by Carrington: an early drawing of around 1910 exists, now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery; and a rather stylised woodcut from around 1916.

Michael Ayrton was an English artist and writer, renowned as a painter, printmaker, sculptor and designer, and also as a critic, broadcaster and novelist. His varied output of sculptures, illustrations, poems, and stories reveals an obsession with flight, myths, mirrors and mazes.

The word oracle derives from the Latin verb ‘to speak’ and in ancient Greece, oracles were thought to speak divine prophecy. Ayrton’s oracle leans forward to impart her message: unfortunately for the recipient the oracles prophecies were often spoken in riddles and difficult to decipher.

Vanishing Point is an ongoing series of drawings in which Barbara Walker explores the presence of Black subjects in Western European Painting. Walker takes inspiration from historic paintings by artists such as Titian, Veronese and Van Dyck and makes graphite drawings on embossed paper.

Vanishing Point was first developed for the Evelyn Williams Drawing Award that Barbara Walker received in 2017 as part of the Jerwood Drawing Prize. She was the first recipient of this award, and it allowed her to develop this new body of work for exhibition at the Jerwood Gallery, (now Hastings Contemporary) in 2019.