Jamie Holman has been chosen as an exhibiting artist for the John Moores Painting Prize 2025 for his work, a modern take on the behaviour of Renaissance masters, which challenges authorship in art.
Jamie, who has played a key role in the Festival of Making in recent years and is also a lecturer in art, has had one of the pieces in his series ‘In Every Home a Heartache’ selected, which will go on display from September 6 to March 1, 2026, at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.
Each piece was staged and photographed in the UK before being commissioned as oil paintings in a factory in China.
Jamie then put the finishing touches to each piece in his studio, and his pieces aim to challenge thinking on what gives a painting its value: the artist, or the actual artwork?
MORE: Blackburn artist commissioned to create masterpiece to mark Queen’s Platinum Jubilee
MORE: Blackburn crocheter ‘gobsmacked’ as creation wins Turner Prize
His method is a modern interpretation of how many Renaissance artists operated, using other artists to do work for them.
However, rather than using artists in a studio, he enlisted the modern technique of global outsourcing and invisible labour, itself contributing to the subject of his pieces.
He also asks whether an artist’s vision and decision-making is more important than actually applying the paint directly, and aims to show it is the physical painting that matters, not the act of painting it.
The painting nominated for the award is a family portrait, with the father wearing a balaclava.
He says the image “merges the banality of the everyday with the language of terror, exploring class, protest and power against a backdrop of state control and collective resistance”.
On his work, Jamie said: “The paintings are made in China because there is an emerging legacy of manufacturing relocation from Lancashire to China, but also to explore the notion that there is an emerging representation of class, culture and history via international web interventions, manipulating our politics.
“Ultimately, the work is about labour, class, authorship and representation.
“To paint them myself would have rendered the sitters as passive and avoided the provocations that this system of production makes visible.
“I’m interested in what it means for the artist’s hand to be absent, yet the artist’s voice and intent to be everywhere, as I’m also interested in the demonisation of white working-class men and how that has been achieved.”
The John Moores Painting Prize was founded in 1957 and is named after the Lancastrian businessman who founded Littlewoods and the Football Pools.
It is awarded every two years at the Walker Art Gallery, and previous winners have included David Hockney and Rose Wylie.
From more than 3,000 entries, a finalist list of 66 was selected, with their work being put on display at the exhibition.
Five nominees for the First Prize have been selected – sadly, Jamie is not one of them – with the winner to be revealed on September 4.
