W Magazine reports that London-based artist Ella Fleck has won this year's Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Award for *training material (aria)* (2026), her solo presentation with Los Angeles gallery Ehrlich Steinberg in Frieze London's Focus section.

To gather material, Fleck spent six weeks as "Elliot," a chat operator messaging users on behalf of a male content creator.

London's Evening Standard lists her booth (F30) among its Focus-section highlights, noting she posed as a man and trained as an OnlyFans "chatter" — the workers who impersonate female performers in chat.

According to W Magazine, the work interrogates heterosexual male fantasies: male voices perform conversations that rise from a platform built of raised floor tiles typically found in data centers, with devices fitted beneath turning sound into vibrations visitors can physically feel.

The Standard describes her installation as conjuring up the mechanics and feeling of that chat-operator world.

The Spaces, reviewing the fair from Regent's Park, says critics kept returning to heightened colour, lush landscapes, otherworldly figures and dreamlike settings — worlds shaped by nature, mythology and folklore.

Its standouts include Kudzanai-Violet Hwami's saturated paintings and sculpture at Victoria Miro (Booth D12), with *Sorbus Hymn II* reading like layered natural landscapes, plus Vanessa Raw's mythic Margate figures and Emii Alrai's unfired-clay and patinated copper vessels at Carl Friedman Gallery.

Against that painterly consensus, Fleck's machine-and-vibration room reads as a deliberate break.

W Magazine highlights Eilen Itzel do Espírito Santo, the Dominican American artist nominated by Firelei Báez for Frieze's Artist-to-Artist programme, showing a solo booth with Bolanle Contemporary; The Spaces notes her deep-red floor, pink walls and air-dried clay sculptures evoking vessels and landscape fragments.

The Standard singles out Selma Selman's scrap-metal self-portraits at acb Gallery and Dalton Paula's paintings restoring visibility to Black historical figures at Lisson. These nominations show how established artists are staking their reputations on who they think matters next.

The Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Award has, per W Magazine's framing, put an artist whose practice spans sound, scent, language and architecture in front of the fair's collecting class.

For readers of the art market, the stakes are whether a Research-and-development-style installation — one that required undercover fieldwork — translates into institutional momentum, in a week when, as the Standard puts it, art fever grips every gallery, church and warehouse in London.

Fleck's win suggests the fair's Focus section is where careers now ignite, not the main tent.

W Magazine notes the fair runs through October 18, with the city's biggest art week extending beyond it: Salman Toor's first European solo show at the Courtauld through January 10, 2027, and Tarek Atoui's Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern through April 11, 2027.

The Standard adds Frieze Sculpture and off-fair shows like Maria Kreyn's *Dream Logic* at the Swiss Church.