2021 Award Winners and Finalists

Catherine O'Donnell
WINNER - $20,000 ACQUISITIVE PRIZE
Still Lives
Charcoal on Paper, 47 x 110cm
My art practice is anchored in the suburbs, depicting the urban aesthetic which shapes and informs our everyday lives; it searches for the humanity, history, and politics of a place by reframing the familiar. Presenting untethered architectural details, my drawings strip back the supposed uniformity of suburbia, unveiling the individuality within its often dismissed or overlooked dwellings. Using minimalism, I isolate these modest buildings from their contexts and represent only their structure to explore their compositional potential and underlying symmetry, striving to offer a renewed vision of these landscapes, often seen as bleak. I aim to inscribe the lives lived within these dwellings, to insinuate the qualities of home, to reassert value.
Sonia Martignon
HIGHLY COMMENDED - $2,000 NON-ACQUISITIVE
We Need the Tonic of Wildness
Acrylic and Pyrography on Hand-cut Plywood, 81 x 121cm
Standing at the point where human development has halted and the wilderness stretches ahead untamed allows a glimpse into the past, to a time when nature flourished. Living in the verdant Top End and armed with the belief that all living things are connected by the habitats we share, my work aims to capture this precious wildness, documenting its wealth of colour, shape, spirit, and mood. It pays homage to the fertile environments that are under constant threat. Climate drawdown is the most comprehensive scientific plan we have developed to reverse the destruction of our natural world. Sequestering carbon in the soil, drawing it down through our precious plants, will mean we can reverse centuries of human folly. Protecting and regenerating our disappearing forests and bushland is key.
Christine Druitt-Preston
HIGHLY COMMENDED - $2,000 NON-ACQUISITIVE
The Chinese Screen
Lino Block Print on Wenzhou Paper, 103 x 76cm
Informed by a drawing of the Tweed Regional Gallery Margaret Olley home studio re-creation, ‘The Chinese screen’ 2021 is a two-block lino print that reinterprets a motif used by Olley in many of her paintings. Here the screen, placed in the small yellow room that was her original studio in her Duxford Street, Paddington home, is underpinned by the ghosts of patterns borrowed from my living room studio, as though floating on a lace curtain.This work acknowledges the lineage of women artists whose artworks respond to the domestic interiors that also served as their studios.
Tristan Chant
COMMENDED
Lobster with Fruit Bowl
Pigment on Paper (Digital Print), 66 x 150cm
In nature, a decomposer is an organism that decomposes, or breaks down organic matter to recycle back into the ecosystem, providing nutrients for regrowth and regeneration.
Lobster with Fruit Bowl (part of the Decomposer series), explores ways of replicating the decomposition process in the art ecosystem. Digital images of still life paintings which have representations of organic matter are passed through algorithms in music and photo editing software. In this way, the reproductions of the paintings represent the organic matter while the algorithms act as the decomposer. The resulting works are randomly stretched and decayed across the picture plane.
Jaedon Shin
COMMENDED
At The Temple
Acrylic, 146 x 146cm
My painting, ‘At The Temple’ is a sort of pandemic fable. This image might have come to my mind in a supernatural situation of Covid19 that has never been experienced before. It is ironic to recall such a collective society after a long time of isolation caused by a harsh lockdown.
The society that divides the world into dichotomies of good and evil is religious. People gather and pray at temples in deep mountains. Their numbers are so high that the temple is cramped. For them, those outside the temple are evil and they are the only good. The night is already getting deeper. There are two moons floating like ghosts above the mountain, shining faintly. Enemies are all gone and only they exist in the world. Now they are fighting each other. But there's no distance between them, so everyone looks like a lump.