Still Dancing: Yvonne Crossley Wins Prestigious Award

86-year-old Yvonne Crossley has won a prestigious international drawing competition for her wire sculpture of a dancer.

Octogenarian Dancer, a suspended wire figure that captures a dancer's poise without arms or legs, has taken the top prize at this year's Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, the UK's largest and longest-running open award for drawing. It's a fitting choice of subject for an artist who describes her own body, hip replacements and all, in the same breath as her work: "I'm on sticks, okay, I've got replacement hips, but I'm still, I'm still dancing".

The 2026 exhibition, featured in a recent article by The Nudge on the The Best Exhibitions To See In London Now, brings together 92 drawings by 86 artists, whittled down from 2,621 entries submitted by 1,403 artists across 48 countries. 

Situated in the atmospheric dock buildings around London's only lighthouse, the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize is well worth a visit. Crossley's winning piece is in excellent company among a range of works that push the boundaries of what drawing can be, celebrating the diversity of contemporary drawing practice today.

For Crossley's winning piece, she deliberately left the arms and legs off of the figure. Not, she's keen to point out, as a statement of loss, but because a full figure starts to look like a doll rather than a dancer. Suspended and slightly off-balance, tilting at the shoulders and head, the wire figure catches the idea of movement rather than an illustration of it.

Crossley began making wire figures in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as part of a PhD by practice, and has continued the series intermittently since, arranging single figures into new configurations rather than building a fixed body of work. "I don't think it's over yet", she said. "It gives me new energy to make more and different".

The title reflects the piece's origins. "I'm in my 80s," Crossley said, "and one of the things that I'm interested in is some kind of celebration of arriving at this point in life".

Crossley, who has had both hips replaced and now walks with sticks, sees the work as a celebration of what her body can still do. "We're very lucky to have bodies that function at any time", she says. "I can't get over the privilege". 

Selector Sook-Kyung Lee, Director of the Whitworth, called it a rare treatment of a subject art has largely left alone. "We reside in a culture invested in youth, which maintains a vexed relationship with old age", she said, "and that hasn't been much explored in art. This work is about an ageing woman's body, and how it changes through different stages". 

Crossley wasn't the only artist recognised this year's prizes. The Trinity Buoy Wharf Student Drawing Award went to Elena Grassi for giving only good, only good when giving, 2025, graphite on paper and tape on travertine. And the first ever Trinity Buoy Wharf Three Boroughs' Drawing Award, a new prize for artists living or working in Tower Hamlets, Newham or Greenwich, went to Lucie Holzer for Stairway at Dusk, 2026, ink, charcoal and graphite pencil on paper. 

The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize was founded in 1994 by Anita Taylor and Paul Thomas as the Rexel Derwent Open Drawing Exhibition. It became the Cheltenham Open Drawing Exhibition in 1996, then the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2001, receiving seventeen years of support from the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, before the Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust became principal funder in 2018. The 2026 exhibition marks its 32nd edition, and it is regarded as the foremost annual open exhibition dedicated to drawing in the UK.

The 2026 selection panel comprised artist Matthew Burrows MBE, founder of the Artist Support Pledge; Sook-Kyung Lee, Director of The Whitworth and Professor of Curatorial Practices at the University of Manchester; and Professor Anita Taylor, artist and founder of the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize.

The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2026 is free to enter, and runs daily 11am-6pm, until Sunday 4th October at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated Exhibition Publication, an Education Pack, and a public engagement programme.