From Heart to Hand: Registrations Open for Hand & Lock’s 2026 Embroidery Prize
The Hand & Lock Prize for Embroidery returns for 2026, marking 25 years of celebrating embroidered excellence and opening registrations to artists, designers and makers worldwide. Since its inception in 2000, the Prize has become one of the most respected platforms for contemporary embroidery, showcasing work from practitioners in over 60 countries and affirming stitch as a vital and expressive art form.
Hand & Lock’s Prize Brief Moodboard for 2026.
This anniversary year’s brief, Embroidery Talks: Visual Storytelling from Heart to Hand, invites entrants to explore embroidery as a narrative language. While storytelling is often associated with words, music or performance, the brief reminds us that some of the most enduring stories exist beyond text. From the Bayeux Tapestry to the choreography of Swan Lake, visual and material narratives have long carried emotion, memory and meaning across time.
Severina Seidl, Maleficium (detail). First place winner of the 2025 Hand and Lock Student Textile Art Prize. Image: Hand & Lock.
Drawing on the deep linguistic and metaphorical connections between textiles and storytelling (think 'spinning a yarn', 'weaving narratives', or even 'embellishing the truth'), the brief positions the embroiderer as both author and narrator. Needle becomes quill, thread becomes ink, and materials such as beads, sequins, silk floss and bullion act as punctuation, metaphor and tone. Entrants are encouraged to translate stories from the realms of folklore, myth, literature, oral history, music or personal memory into embroidered form, whether through instinctive spontaneity or rigorous research-led practice.
Ilaria Harris, Syncresis (detail). First Place: Open Fashion Prize 2025.
The brief also opens space for critical reflection. Artists are invited to consider different narrative structures, and to interrogate how meaning is carried through symbolism, texture and sensation. Referencing thinkers such as Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, the brief asks how embroidery might communicate ideas that sit beneath language, embedded in the body, rhythm and material itself.
Lucy May, The Tears of Saint Clare. Second Place: Student Textile Art Prize, 2025.
As ever, the Prize celebrates both conceptual strength and technical excellence. There are four categories, with three winners in each, alongside a Chairman’s Choice Award recognising outstanding innovation in hand embroidery. First Prize winners in each category receive $4,000 USD, a commemorative hand-embroidered plaque, and a Hand & Lock gift card, with additional awards recognising specific skills and techniques through partner organisations.
Rooted in a history that stretches back to 1767, Hand & Lock remains synonymous with exceptional craftsmanship, from military regalia and haute couture to contemporary art embroidery. Through the Prize, the studio continues its long-standing commitment to nurturing new talent and ensuring the future of embroidery as both craft and cultural expression.
For those with a story to tell — personal, political, imagined or inherited — this is an invitation to let thread speak.
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Further Information:
Hand and Lock Prize Details and Registration
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Image Credits:
Lead: Annette Ratti, First Place Open Fashion Prize, 2024.
All further images as credited in photo captions.