James Lomax: Government Art Collection Acquisition

By James Latunji-Cockbill, Producer – Art in Prisons

James Lomax graduated from the Royal Academy School in 2022 and works across multiple mediums. In his practice he often reuses and reframes found objects by shifting their materiality or changing their function/purpose. With a strong art historical influence, his work has a specific interest in institutional critique and exhibition making as well as site-reactive interventions.

Lomax undertook a two-month residency at HMP Grendon in Spring 2024, concluding with an exhibition of new work titled A Tale of Two Cities. Featuring framed cast concrete works, c-type photographic prints and repurposed sodium street lamps, the exhibition introduced prison residents to contemporary practice. Lomax also facilitated workshops to introduce casting techniques in the prison’s art studio, producing jesmonite tiles featuring prisoners’ drawings made using caulk.

In 2025 a trio of works by Lomax – Hoarding, Store front, Shutter (2024) – were acquired by the Government Art Collection. Taking a form somewhere between sculpture and painting, the work is cast in concrete in low relief and depicts unopened envelopes scattered across anonymous surfaces.

Exhibiting the work at HMP Grendon reframed a common motif in Lomax’s work – the unopened letter – in terms of prisoners’ experiences of communicating with the outside world. UK prisons often still rely on hand-written communication, particularly with official correspondence such as letters of parole.

Lomax has been independently awarded the Northern European Mobility Opportunity (NEMO) from Nordisk Kulturfond, funding field research at Agder Kunstakademi, Agder Prison, Norway in 2026.

Installation images: James Lomax at HMP Grendon (2024). Image courtesy Ikon. Photo by Tod Jones.

Hoarding, Store front, Shutter (2024) © James Lomax. Images: UK Government Art Collection