India Carpenter (Goldsmiths: BA (Hons) in Textiles)
This year's winner of the 'Elke Lacey Award for Textiles', Carpenter's use of mixed techniques within her work is unique and expert. Her outsized photographic self-portrait, '763,360.1/60', is immediately arresting and quietly seductive. The title refers to the amount of seconds that Carpenter has used to initially hand-stitch her own visage and then to photograph the result. By which means she creates an array of tensions; temporal, surface and technical, through which she invites us to share in her own anxieties and uncertainties of self-representation.

Emily Davies (Goldsmiths: MA in Textiles)
Davies' text-based work derives fundamentally from her own dyslexia. Sharing in Barthes' consternation at colloquial versus official language, Davies questions the latter and enforces her own way of expressing herself according to her own means. In choosing to employ shop sign letters, she brings into question symbolic orders within advertising and the commercial sector.