Two new artist commissions, supported through the second round of Jerwood Art Fund Commissions, will see Charmaine Watkiss and Yuen Fong Ling create some of their most ambitious work to date. These projects will enrich UK public collections and draw on archives and family histories to inspire new conversations about memory, identity and ancestral knowledge.
The New Art Gallery Walsall has been awarded funding to commission a major new sculptural installation by British artist Charmaine Watkiss whose practice investigates the botanical legacy of the Caribbean. The Things We Hold Sacred builds on ideas explored in Watkiss’ acclaimed Plant Warriors series - drawings inspired by spiritual belief systems shaped by the transatlantic slave trade, which personify plants as mythical female warrior figures - and extends these motifs for the first time into freestanding, three-dimensional sculptural forms.
Developed in partnership with Coventry University, where Watkiss will work with paid art students, this ambitious project will be the first sculptural installation by Charmaine Watkiss to enter a UK collection. The installation will be on display at New Art Gallery Walsall from 2 October 2026 - 11 April 2027.
The British Library and Leeds Art Gallery, in partnership, have been awarded funding to commission The Fold, a new multi-part artwork by British-Chinese artist Yuen Fong Ling, created in dialogue with books, sculptures and objects from their respective collections. Inspired by his own family history of migration to the UK from Lai Chi Chong in Hong Kong, Ling’s commission will challenge the myths, stereotypes and social expectations that have been portrayed in historical narratives by reframing the stories of British-Hong Kong families.
Using the folding fan as a recurring motif, Ling will bring these ideas together in an exhibition that presents new artworks alongside artists’ books from the British Library, folded sculptural forms from the Leeds Museums and Galleries collection, and social history artefacts from the Chinese community for an exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery from May to October 2027.
Jerwood Art Fund Commissions offer a rare opportunity for an artist and museum to work together on a fully funded, ambitious commission. A partnership between Art Fund and Jerwood Foundation, the programme enables museums and galleries to collaborate with early- to mid-career artists on new work, covering the full costs of delivering and presenting commissions.
The inaugural round of funding in 2025 saw the University of Aberdeen and Tate Liverpool commission artists Sekai Machache and Julianknxx respectively to create new works for their collections. Sekai Machache’s Aberdeen Tapestry will be unveiled later this year at the University of Aberdeen’s Sir Duncan Rice Library, whilst Julianknxx’s immersive, multichannel video and sound installations will be unveiled at Tate Liverpool and the International Slavery Museum from 2028 following completion of major capital redevelopments.
Lara Wardle, Executive Director and Trustee, Jerwood Foundation, said:
These two new Jerwood Art Fund Commissions, awarded to Charmaine Watkiss and Yeung Fong Ling, will enable the artists to realise ambitious new works, which will in turn enrich our public collections and benefit visitors. This unique partnership with Art Fund, now in its second year, underlines Jerwood Foundation’s long-standing commitment to excellence and emerging talent in the arts in the UK.
Jenny Waldman, Director of Art Fund said:
Jerwood Art Fund Commissions provide a rare opportunity for museums to offer fully funded commissions to exciting artists for ambitious projects like these from Charmaine Watkiss and Yuen Fong Ling. These commissions continue our long-standing partnership with Jerwood Foundation, highlighting the transformative power of collections in keeping museums vibrant, engaging, and full of artistic ambition.
About Charmaine Watkiss
Charmaine Watkiss RWA is a British artist whose practice investigates the botanical legacy of the Caribbean. She is particularly interested in healing traditions handed down through the matrilineal line, her work reflects this through constructed narratives around women. She accesses public archives which serve as a material from which she constructs narrative responses. Her compositions of women all use her own likeness as a way of enacting what she calls ‘memory stories’, channeling a multitude of strong female archetypes in order to inform her works on paper, some as large as life sized.
About Yeung Fong Ling
Yuen Fong Ling is an artist curator based in Sheffield. Ling has a performance and participatory based art practice that explores his biographical connections with permitted histories, people, places, and objects. Ling’s practice considers how race, gender, class, and sexuality (as a British born Chinese gay man from Salford) align with other historical personages to bridge the conjunctive gap between histories, stories, and places. Recently, he explored the making, gifting, and wearing of sandals once designed and handmade by gay socialist activist Edward Carpenter (1844–1929). Titled Towards Memorial, the Carpenter sandals became the protagonist in generating discussion, interviews, visual strategies that developed artworks, artefacts, exhibition design, and a series of films that drew the narrative together, to consider the sandals when gifted and worn, as an alternative form of public memorial.
February 4, 2026
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