05/02/2026
ANNOUNCEMENT: CAT Digital Bursary Award Winner 2026, Beatrice Arden.
We are delighted to announce final year Sculpture and Environmental Art student Beatrice Arden as our award recipient. This is the first year we have extended the application process to all schools across GSA. The quality and quantity of applications was high, making the judging both great fun and challenging. Thank you to all applicants, and to our judges; Mairi Mackenzie, Laura Spring Studio Spring, and Anna Campbell-Jones.
To give you a flavour of Beatrice's application, "My final year project uses textile practices to examine the relationship between human labour and machinery, drawing a parallel between early nineteenth-century Luddite resistance in Britain and current issues surrounding artificial intelligence and technological advancement. The Luddites were textile workers in Britain who organised against industrial machinery which threatened job security and working conditions.
I will explore the story of the Luddites - their leaders, ideology, and actions - through a combination of textile processes, including jacquard weaving, digital embroidery, hand embroidery, and CAT’s printing machinery, investigating the tension between slow, tactile, age-old textile traditions and the speed and abstraction of modern technology.
Rather than rejecting these machines or presenting them as inherently harmful, this project centres the experiences of the people affected by technological change. By weaving, embroidering, and printing the stories of the Luddites using the very machines they once resisted (such as the jacquard loom) I aim to reinsert working people into the narrative of technological progress. The work positions textile machinery as a site where human labour, history, and contemporary debates intersect.”
Beatrice receives,
£500 credit towards digital print and base fabrics.
£250 cash to contribute to your project costs.
Consultation and development of your ideas with CAT staff to a value of £250.
