Milly Aburrow
No One Gets The Prize, 2026

Canvas, PVC, Sand, Clay, Stained Glass, Wool, Plywood, Resin & Mohair 

There is a peculiar magnetism to the British seaside, found not only in the salt air but in a nostalgia that feels both collective and deeply personal. It is a place defined by its simple pleasures and quiet. These moments form a lasting connection to the seaside as a place suspended in contradictions. Growing up on the coast has shaped a life attuned to its rituals, from slow, wandering days along the shoreline to winter mornings spent watching my mum slip into the freezing sea. It is a place defined by its simple pleasures and quiet absurdities: fish and chips doused in vinegar, sugar-dusted doughnuts in crinkled paper bags, and pastel clouds of candy floss that cling to your fingertips. 

A coastal town’s beauty lies as much in its eccentric artifice as its natural charm, from the fading grandeur of the pier to the riot of neon lights and the hum of arcade machines over carpets dusted with sand. This body of work explores the emotional texture of these spaces, where joy exists alongside a softer melancholy. The seaside was once a place of unfiltered wonder for me, a site of childhood freedom and delight. Now, as an adult, that same environment carries a quiet weight: a recognition of how those early sensations of pleasure and escape intersect with the realities of addiction, repetition, and longing.

Milly Aburrow is a Margate-based sculptor and installation artist inspired by food culture, consumerism and personal experience. She creates uncanny simulations drawn from everyday life, inviting audiences into immersive environments that evoke memory, reflection and shared experience. Her installations revisit lived experience and reclaim agency, often adopting fictionalised service industry roles that blur boundaries between reality and performance. 

Through these playful yet critical scenarios, Aburrow explores inaccessibility within professional spaces as a disabled artist, questioning who is permitted to occupy certain roles. She graduated from Bath Spa University in 2023, receiving the Kenneth Armitage Young Sculptor Prize, and was a Graduate Resident Artist at 44AD Artspace, Bath (2023–25). She was shortlisted for the Creative Estuary Commission, In The Offing, at Turner Contemporary (2023), and received the Dr Andrew Edney Bursary Award (2025).