At a ceremony held at Scotland House, London, last week, 2025 GSA Painting and Printmaking graduate Mary Lydon was awarded the prestigious Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation Award for ‘Emerging Scottish Artist of the Year’ for 2025. Lydon, originally from Ukraine, is now based in Glasgow and is currently studying on GSA’s Master of Fine Art programme. She works in a range of disciplines, including painting, drawing, engraving, and traditional crafts, drawing inspiration from her Ukrainian heritage, combining intricate traditional embroidery and woven motifs.
The award, which is made in partnership with Scotland House London, includes a bursary of £1,500 and a display of the artist’s work at Scotland House.
Lydon’s works address the erosion of Ukrainian culture by Russia, utilising a range of disciplines, including painting, drawing, engraving, and traditional crafts. Her projects traverse themes of life, death, and rebirth, reflecting the difficult contemporary realities of her homeland. Continually working with the immense visual power of symbols and traditional motifs, Lydon explores cultural symbols, folklore, national emblems, and flags, combining and integrating these traditional images with contemporary references (including manhole covers and military drones) into her embroidered pieces and hand-woven tapestries.
“I think the desire to learn to embroider or weave comes from a willingness to understand and research my identity. Embroidery is something my grandmother used to do, and her mother used to do. I’m just trying to understand my identity through art-making.” Says GSA graduate Mary Lydon.
“Ukraine is heavily associated with embroidery and rug-making, so every summer for the last three years I have tried to go on field trips to villages in different regions of Ukraine to learn from elderly people what their artistic practice was. It’s common to decorate houses with little floral wall paintings, embroidery, and woven rugs, to make the house cosy and nice, but it is also art.”
“To me, it is important to speak in my work about current realities, war realities. I didn’t want my pieces to be only decorative and floral and look nice. I wanted to embed some symbols associated with the Russia-Ukraine war.”
The Fleming-Wyfold award, now in its second year, celebrates artists who combine material craftsmanship with contemporary sensibility. For further details please visit the Fleming-Wyfold press release regarding this years winners announcement HERE.
for further information please contact press@gsa.a.c.uk
About The Glasgow School of Art (GSA)
The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) is internationally recognised as one of Europe’s leading independent university-level institutions for education and research in the visual creative disciplines. Our studio-based, specialist, practice-led teaching, learning and research draw talented individuals with a shared passion for visual culture and creative production from all over the world. Originally founded in 1845 as one of the first Government Schools of Design, the School’s history can be traced back to 1753 and the establishment of the Foulis Academy, delivering a European-style art education. Today, the GSA is an international community of over 3,500 students and staff across architecture, design, fine art, innovation and technology in our campuses in Glasgow and Altyre (in the Scottish Highlands), and a thriving Open Studio programme delivering non-degree provision to over 1,500 students annually.
About The Fleming-Wyford Art Foundation
The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation owes its existence to the formation of the finest collection of Scottish art outside public institutions, comprising over 600 works from the seventeenth century to the present day. The Collection dates back to 1968 when investment bank Robert Fleming & Co, which had been founded by Dundonian, Robert Fleming, in 1873, began to acquire Scottish art to hang in its offices worldwide. Following the sale of the bank in 2000, the Collection was vested, under the guidance of the family, in the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation. The Wyfold name was adjoined to commemorate the life of the last Lord Wyfold, a grandson of Robert Fleming.
Today, the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation is endowed to care and enhance the Collection and to promote an understanding and awareness of Scottish art and creativity largely outside Scotland through a programme of cultural diplomacy, exhibitions, individual loans, events, publishing and education. The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation is also committed to minimising the impact that the Foundation has on the environment by reducing our carbon footprint and continuing to strengthen our environmental practices.
The Foundation is a registered charity in England and Wales (No.1080197). Company Ltd by Guarantee (No. 03965285).
