Outer Spaces Scotland Award

RSA New Contemporaries 2026

In the third year of our partnership with the Royal Scottish Academy, Outer Spaces are delighted to award two Outer Spaces Scotland Awards. Selected from the RSA New Contemporaries 2026 exhibition, artists Sam Black and Kate Hall will receive a large-scale Outer Spaces studio space for 1+ months, together with a £500 bursary. 

Now in its seventeenth year, the RSA New Contemporaries offers a unique opportunity to see some of the most promising talent in Scotland in one single, large-scale exhibition in the heart of Edinburgh. Showcasing 64 graduates selected from the 2025 degree shows, the exhibition is the best overview of the current outlook of emerging Scottish art and architecture.

Samantha Black is a British-Filipino painter and graduate of Edinburgh College of Art. Creating symbolic imagery that draws from dreams, memory, and imagination, the artist uses painting to process the chaos and randomness of external and internal worlds. Her work explores the unstable terrain between language and image, the places where meaning fractures, mistranslates, or dissolves altogether. Through layered oil painting, Black investigates how images can be recontextualised through the subconscious with a density of intentions that creates a visual/thematical collapse, where multiple and conflicting ideas can exist on the same canvas. Black combines animal and human imagery, drawing from a visual language of myth, occult ritual, and devotional iconography. 

"I'm so thrilled to be selected for this award, as a graduate artist the opportunity to have space and funding to continue creating outside of art school is so appreciated, and I want to thank Outer Spaces for consistently supporting young artists." – Sam Black

Kate Hall is a Glasgow based painter and filmmaker. She recently graduated from the Glasgow School of Art with a BA in Painting and Printmaking. Hall’s practice focuses on rural landscapes, specifically those onto which agricultural and industrial architecture has been pressed into the surface. Having grown up in a small farm in East Wales, she is interested in the cultural perception of landscape as an inert pastoral background and seeks to contradict this in her work. Hall’s paintings express a mechanised experience of nature, paintings which give similar immediacy and fluidity as the experience of moving through the countryside, watching the landscape as if it were a film. Scenes dip in and out of view; tress jump forward and are suddenly flung back into the distance, revealing long stretches of flooded fields.

“My Outer Spaces studio made it possible for me to make my large scale paintings for the RSA New Contemporaries show. I am thrilled to be awarded a larger space, and look forward to making a new series of work with it.” - Kate Hall

See the artists' work on display as part of RSA New Contemporaries 2026, on display until 22 April 2026

Images:

1. Sam Black, 'Birds Eye (I Understand Everyone Is Like Me)', 2026. Courtesy of the Royal Scottish Academy

2. Kate Hall, Watching for Rain, 2026. Courtesy of the Royal Scottish Academy