101 gold rats, a 'self portrait as a horse' and a tribute to motherhood take home top prizes at this year's Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

Sikelela Owen’s Knitting has won this year’s Charles Wollaston Award, the most prestigious prize of the Royal Academy’s (RA) Summer Exhibition. The portrait, an oil-on-canvas portrayal of her mother, originated from a photograph of her mother sitting on a bench in Bristol. ‘It’s one that I’ve looked at since I was a child,’ she said, ‘and I just, all of a sudden, felt compelled to develop it into a painting.’ That compulsion has yielded a prize of £34,000.

The award was established in 1978 after a donation from Charles Wollaston, who was a long-time supporter of the RA and an enthusiastic lecturer on art. After his death, the RA received a substantial bequest that allowed it to endow the prize in perpetuity. This year’s judges were the British printmaker and RA president Rebecca Salter, the writer and critic Olivia Laing, artist Hew Locke and author Elif Shafak.

Other prizes awarded for this year’s Summer Exhibition include The AXA Art Prize (£10,000) for ‘an outstanding work of figurative art’. This went to Miho Sato for her painting Windy Day 2. The Jack Goldhill Award for Sculpture (£10,000) was awarded to Zatorski + Zatorski, the London-based collaborative artists and ‘life-partners’, who created a piece made up of 101 white rat pelts which have been filled with 24-carat gold. It is simply titled I, and is being sold for £85,000 — a bargain for all those rats, if you have a coffee table big enough.

Winsome Yuen won The British Institution Fund Award for Students (£5,000) for her piece, Superstition. Further prizes were awarded to Steven Dixon, who won The Hugh Casson Drawing Prize, and Anousha Payne, whose ‘self-portrait as a horse’ impressed judge Rebecca Lucy Taylor (best known as the musical artist Self Esteem). Frances Featherstone won The Maire Ragnhild Hollingsworth Prize for Oil Painting, Trevor Price won The Viking Prize for Print and Emmanuel Awuni was awarded The Arts Club Award.

All of the pieces are on display at the Summer Exhibition, which is open to the public until August 17. The Exhibition was one of the founding principles of the RA which stated it would ‘mount an annual exhibition open to all artists of distinguished merit’ to finance the training of young artists in the Royal Academy Schools. It has been held each year since 1769 and is the largest open submission contemporary arts show in the world.

Speaking about her Charles Wollaston Award win, Owen said she was inspired by Thomas Gainsborough’s A Lady Walking in a Garden with a Child when painting Knitting. Diego Velázquez is another of her inspirations, as is Edgar Degas and Kerry James Marshall.

She said she was surprised to win the prize, ‘because, I guess it feels like quite a quiet painting to me’. ‘It’s one I’m very proud of, but it’s really quite a quiet one to me, so I was super pleased to find that they liked and connected with it.’ She added that ‘winning the prize still feels quite overwhelming’, but with a young family herself, the prize money is very meaningful ‘in the sense that it gives me nursery fees and allows me more time in the studio.’

The Royal Academy of Art's Summer Exhibition runs until August 17.