The Dubel Prize
The Dubel Prize stands as a prestigious accolade, dedicated to acknowledging and uplifting emerging British artists who showcase their exceptional work either within the bounds of Britain or on the international stage.
Ellie Damant has been selected from many thousands of entrants internationally as one of only nine finalists for The Dubel Prize 2025. All images copyright of the artist © Ellie Damant.
Title: B Priceless. Date: 2022. Medium: Oil on canvas in handmade frame. Framed Dimensions: 825 mm x 825 mm. Description: A female figure belies the branding of a barcode on her face with a seeming exhortation to the viewer and perhaps herself: B Priceless.
Title of painting: Consumer. Date: 2024. Medium: Oil on canvas in handmade frame. Dimensions: 1088 mm x 1088 mm. Description: The potential for markets to constantly reinvent or self-consume is explored in this work. Jeffrey Dahmer is depicted with a red barcode on his face and the word consumer, referencing his murders and our own ceaseless consuming. The police height chart converts into the National Readership Survey social grades hierarchy of consumers. The idea of the Ouroboros or snake consuming its own tail is present: the market and consumer rebirth and recategorisation can be both a freedom and a curse, but is always an overarching power.
Title of painting: Everything Must Go. Date: 2024. Medium: Oil on canvas in handmade frame. Framed Dimensions: 1020 mm x 1020 mm. Description: Jesus appears, his face within the universe’s nebulae. He appears to envisage humanity’s selling of all things but the barcode on his face tells us that the real closing down sale comes at the end of the universe’s being and our own. Wearing Nietzsche’s famous phrase ‘God Is Dead’ like a scar on his forehead, Jesus ironically appears alive, but the meaning of Nietzsche’s phrase remains in the barcode: A fall into nihilism is challenged only by creating our own meaning and authentic value, before our ultimate closing down sale at the end of our lives.
Title of painting: Gold Kim. Date: 2025. Medium: 24 Carat gold, Oil on canvas in handmade frame. Dimensions: 755 mm x 755 mm. Description: Kim Kardashian appears like a religious icon surrounded by 24 Carat gold. Worshiped for her appearance, Kardashian’s famous behind is referenced with the surreal peach emoji, visual slang for bottom. The bar code on the peach represents Kardashian’s shrewd monetisation of her appearance. Quoted under the barcode in currency symbols is philosopher Berkeley’s phrase Esse Est Percipi or To be is to be perceived, the claim objects only exist when they are perceived. It highlights the viewing of curated identities through social media which now bestows a powerful new social validity of existence upon those ‘viewed’ this way in our contemporary society. This work is also inspired by philosophers Baudrillard, Rancière and Foucault. It critiques the pressure yet power in constantly being visible on social media, in order to generate wealth, making art of the simulations of identities that have become the spectacle creating what is considered ‘real’, what has a voice and therefore what ‘exists’ within society.
Title of painting: …But Eternity Cannot Be Sold. Date: 2024. Medium: Oil on canvas in handmade frame. Dimensions: 550 mm x 550 mm. Description: The saying ‘Time Is Money’ rolls across the sky like the ‘ticker’ of the stock markets, a barcode threading through behind and becoming part of the sky. Above the setting sun the ancient message of the universe reminds us the extremes of existence and time, (sadly, happily or indifferently) resist definition by the human decision making, emotion and speculation of our economic exchange values.
Title of painting: Best B4 Lost. Date: 2024. Medium: Oil on canvas in handmade frame. Dimensions: 1020 mm x 1020 mm. Description: The Amazon Rainforest spirit of the Curupira with its head on fire is the inspiration for this female figure. She is surrounded by glass wing butterflies, the Blue Morpho, the Blue Wave, the Green Banded Urania and the Prepona Deiphile whilst a barcode burns on her head. Her arms are alight with a poem about the destruction of the forest and the quantum efficiency of all plants via photosynthesis. Richard Davies’ book Extreme Economies inspired this picture with its description of Panama’s self destructive economy of teak subsidies which is an example of a self consuming economy best avoided in the pursuit of healthy markets and our survival.
Title of painting: No Returns. Date: 2025. Medium: Oil on canvas in handmade frame. Dimensions: 960 mm x 960 mm. Description: A man has given his body to science after death, with light travelling from him like a soul. His tattoos tell his story of life and the uncertainty of his human journey. The inspiration for this picture are those who donate their bodies to science and art and some of the themes in the poem of The Rubáiyát by Omar Khayyám. The finality of the writing finger in The Rubáiyát is like the man’s tattoos about the finality and questions of life. The illusion of endless newness and the possibilities of returns of a commodity can be perceived as a way of comforting ourselves against our own mortality. The man’s tattoo of ‘No Returns’ acknowledges at some point we have to cash in and seize the day.
Title of painting: Desire. Date: 2025 Medium: Acrylic and Oil on canvas in handmade frame. Dimensions: 755 mm x 755 mm. Description: An open mouth with $100 bills combines the themes of oral fixation and Marx’s concept of the fetish of the commodity, the ultimate commodity being money. The viewer peers at this through a peephole seen through a barcode which scans as the word DESIRE.
Title of painting: Digital IV Drip Self. Date: 2025. Medium: Acrylic, oil, plastic and paper on panel in custom made perspex box. Dimensions: 407 mm x 305 mm. Description: The Self, individual identities as commodities, and Big Data are the inspiration behind this piece where the individual in the painting, the artist herself, is connected by IV drip to her mobile phone. The social media promise of monetary success and supposed self realisation is pumped into the sitter as liquid gold, while a poem on the potential loss of control and monetisation of our own identities is laid out in receipt or bill format, with a scannable barcode of the artist’s name the only title remaining. Two voices speak in the poem: the human individual and the indefinable A.I. voice of the internet.
Title of painting: Everything I Ever Wanted Is Here Before My Eyes. Date: 2025. Medium: Oil on canvas in handmade frame. Dimensions: 550 mm x 550 mm. Description: A mirrored monolith barcode stands like a Rückenfigur able to peer in every direction, reflect every desire. Underneath, legal tender is described referencing Shelley’s Ozymandias poem. The painting problematises money’s worldly power and importance yet inability to be taken with us beyond death.
Title of painting: I Sell By Infinity. Date: 2025. Medium: 24 carat gold, acrylic and oil on canvas in handmade frame. Dimensions: 1020 mm x 1020 mm. Description: The Hindu goddess Kali, a manifestation of Shakti or divine feminine power and deity of creation, destruction, time and knowledge dominates as a black hole. 24 carat gold surrounds the entry to her singularity and oblivion. Kali smiles with a barcode like an acid tab on her tongue, as if we appear in her own acid trip, which reads “I sell by infinity”, representing how our earthly striving for wealth can become an ultimate power and/or destruction. Kali is surrounded by 52 heads (52 Sanskrit alphabet letters) representing individual human lives each with possible dreams of wealth, hope or fulfilment, ultimately swallowed by infinity.
Title of painting: LUV. Date: 2025 Medium: Acrylic and Oil on canvas in handmade frame. Dimensions: 755 mm x 755 mm. Description: Lovers kiss covered by the barcode of LUV. The viewer has to peer through this code: the lovers appear obscured by money and financial exchanges. A poem describes commodification can occur in all relationships, even in love, whilst still holding onto the hope that true love can still be found.
Title of painting: Mammon Knows Best. Date: 2025. Medium: Oil on canvas in handmade frame. Dimensions: 1020 mm x 1020 mm. Description: Mammon or material wealth in the Bible, is described as being impossible to follow alongside God. Mammon is reimagined as a ‘mother’ punning on the word ‘Maman’ or Mum appearing as the artist’s character Le Gal Tender. Le Gal Tender as a surreal alter ego ‘money oracle’ is here a 1950s pinup ‘mother’ teaching her children to make plenty of money. She simultaneously draws attention to traditional female roles, societal norms that underpin economic structures and the pressure for economic ‘survival’ from birth.
Title of painting: Own Thyself (Temet Nosce). Date: 2025. Medium: Oil on canvas in handmade frame. Dimensions: 755 mm x 755 mm. Description: Mark Zuckerberg is the inspiration for problematising the ownership of digital personal data, the latest frontier of power and money. The barcode for Own Thyself appears in Zuckerberg’s shadow which is also a Facebook ‘like’ hand. Zuckerberg’s admiration of Roman history is referenced with the Latin phrase Temet Nosce or ‘Know Thyself’ on his golden Laurel crown. A question is implicitly posed to the viewer: Do you own and know yourself and where does your individual power and agency end, and that of others' begin?
SOLD. Title of painting: Plato’s Code. Date: 2025. Medium: Oil on canvas in handmade frame. Dimensions: 550 mm x 550 mm. Description: Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, where prisoners mistake shadows for reality is reinvented in a cave with stone henge outside. The ‘prisoner’ in this cave stares at their phone, the digital reality their only reality, as they take a photo of the shadows from Stonehenge becoming a barcode when viewed through the phone camera. The painting simultaneously captures human history from Stonehenge up to the invention of the mobile phone and asks: Are we trapped or free, and who benefits financially from our entrapment?
Title of painting: Trade Tariff Flags. Date: 2025. Medium: 24 carat gold, acrylic and oil on canvas in handmade frames with brass hinges. Dimensions: 550 mm x 1650 mm. Description: The word ‘Trade’ is represented as a scannable barcode, linking the world’s two biggest economies of China and the U.S.A. When Donald Trump introduced tariffs in the US in 2025, it brought into sharp focus the intertwined interdependence of countries economically. The central feature of the barcode is an area of three 24 carat gold stripes representing the increase in the value of gold that the tariff raises influenced. This piece indicates the interconnectedness of politics, economics and nation states, showing in spite of either left or right wing politics, the markets ultimately lead as well as react. Inspired by Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, this triptych is framed as a freestanding sculptural work which folds outwards instead of inwards. This represents the outward facing free market that we currently worship and juxtaposes in it’s construction and nature with the inward spirituality of older religious works of art.
SOLD. Title of painting: SALVATOR VERBI LIBERAE. Date: 2025. Medium: Oil on canvas, hand carved 24 carat gilded frame. Dimensions: 660 mm x 460 mm. Description: Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is recreated as Jesus Christ in a homage to Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World). Musk appears as the Saviour of Free Speech, with the intricate X design ironically referencing his X social media platform, formerly Twitter, which he bought due to and during ongoing free speech controversy. Musk holds Mars instead of the world, indicative of his wish to colonise it and his power to effectively buy it. The planet is emblazoned with a barcode scannable for Mars as a commodity.
Title of painting: The End Is Buy. Date: 2025. Medium: Acrylic and Oil on canvas in handmade frame. Dimensions: 755 mm x 755 mm. Description: The sweep of ancient to contemporary human history is juxtaposed through themes of ancient and modern art (from Lascaux Cave to Magritte) along with the omnipresent Amazon corporation. The work contrasts themes of ancient survival and death, human consciousness in modern art and the challenges of extreme disposable consumption in the modern world. The ubiquitous Amazon marketplace warehouse, now a part of modern culture, is painted up a mountain in a beautiful setting. A mysterious seemingly ancient painting of a barcode (absurdly anachronistic) foretells our future: the end is not nigh, but could be buy.