2021 EXHIBITION. womensartprizetas.com.au LETTER FROM CAROL SCHWARTZ AO, CHAIR TRAWALLA FOUNDATION.
The RANT ARTS team have worked incredibly hard to keep this prize going which showcases some extraordinary Tasmanian talent. Trawalla Foundation has been delighted to support the prize since it was reimagined and see the impact it is having within the community. As we know, the arts sector has been particularly impacted by the pandemic and I commend the team on their perseverance in adapting to the challenges. I am thrilled that the Women’s Art Prize will hold the full set of physical exhibitions this year, beginning in Burnie on 10 June. We are excited about the opening of The Tasman hotel in Hobart later this year, a Trawalla Group development, which will become the proud home to the winning artworks each year. I am proud to support the Women’s Art Prize Tasmania and the important As the state’s only art prize for women, work they are doing to support the the Women’s Art Prize Tasmania is artistic development of Tasmanian pursuing critical work by creating women artists. The prize is a vital step awareness of gender issues as well towards gender equality in the arts by as identifying and promoting the showcasing, celebrating and fostering exceptional talents which exist within the talent of women artists. the community. Carol Schwartz AO Chair Trawalla Foundation
womensartprizetas.com.au 01 ABOUT EXHIBITION THE PRIZE. DATES & LOCATION.
The Women’s Art Prize Tasmania is the state’s only female BURNIE art competition. Re-launched in 2018, the prize aims 11 JUNE - to inspire, facilitate and celebrate the development of 25 JULY 2021 professional and emerging women artists in Tasmania. MAKERS SPACE GALLERY This prestigious and exclusive The Women’s Art Prize Tasmania competition consists of three prize seeks to inspire through: 2 BASS HWY, categories: – Identifying, promoting, encouraging BURNIE, TAS, 7320 • $15,000 acquisitive and celebrating exceptional local and prize presented by the emerging Tasmanian women artists, Trawalla Foundation, – Exhibiting high quality and emerging • $3,000 Bell Bay Aluminium art to the Tasmanian public, People’s Choice award, and, – Increasing awareness of culture, Visual Arts and gender issues within • $1,500 Zonta Emerging Tasmania, HOBART Artist prize. – Developing an extensive network of 8 OCTOBER - The prize is judged by a panel support for women’s art in Tasmania comprised of recognised arts industry 31 OCTOBER 2021 through partnerships and sponsors, professionals. The prize is open to and Tasmanian artists identifying as ROSNY BARN women. Entries are accepted across – Promoting artistic education and LOT 2 ROSNY HILL RD, all mediums and open to artists of all facilitation with schools and young ROSNY PARK TAS 7018 career stages. The prize encourages people. artists of Aboriginal and Torres Strait island heritage to enter.
2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 03 WORDS FROM THE COMMITTEE.
The mission of the Women’s Art Prize Our thanks go to our partners and Tasmania is to empower and celebrate sponsors for their unfailing commitment women artists across the state. This is to the prize and for their ongoing especially important during challenging support of Tasmania’s women artists. times. Women’s Art Prize Tasmania We acknowledge and thank our prize has become one of the state’s most partners: the Trawalla Foundation, KITTY TAYLOR NATHAN TUCKER LOU CLARK prestigious annual art prizes that Bell Bay Aluminium, part of the Rio RANT ARTS. RANT ARTS. BELL BAY ALUMINIUM. encourages and inspires the creativity of Tinto Group and Zonta (Area 5) for their women artists in Tasmania. support of the Acquisitive, Emerging Artists and People’s Choice Prizes. We The importance of the award as would also like to acknowledge the an inspiration and focus cannot be Tasmanian Government, University overstated, with 157 entries submitted of Tasmania, Clarence City Council, for this year’s prize. Our thanks and Contemporary Art Tasmania, Walker admiration go to each artist for their Designs, Think Big Printing and RANT for resilience and talent. They gave so their financial and in-kind support. generously of themselves to submit their entries and we deeply appreciate their Congratulations to our 2021 finalists and support of the prize. prize winners!
CHRISTINE HEPBURN SUE DYSON We would also like to thank and BUSINESS CONSULTANT. ZONTA. acknowledge the judges for their time, expertise, knowledge and experience in shortlisting the 25 finalists and selecting the Acquisitive and Emerging Prizes. 2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 05 MEET OUR JUDGES.
KYLIE JOHNSON. SARAH RHODES. Kylie Johnson is a curator at Contemporary Art Tasmania and has Born in 1974, Sarah studied fine art and psychology gaining her an independent art practice. Kylie has developed and facilitated arts degree from the University of Sydney. Working between numerous projects at CAT including the Shotgun program - since Sydney and Tasmania, she has created documentary-style images its inception in 2010 – to deliver targeted support and opportunity exploring ways in which the natural environment can guide an to Tasmanian artists through industry access, critical engagement understanding of one’s inner world. In 2020, she won the Women’s and the provision of new work. She employs curatorship within Art Prize Tasmania with Paper Plane and in 2011 she won the her practice as a means of enabling and shaping the social New York Photo Award (Fine Art) for Play, depicting children relationships through which art is generated. undertaking survival games in the bush to understand their feelings of grief. Five times a finalist in the National Photographic Kylie received her MFA from the University of Tasmania in Hobart Portrait Prize, in 2014 she exhibited at Photoville in New York and during which time she also studied at the Glasgow School of in 2015 at the Australian Centre for Photography. Her photographs Art, Scotland. Supported by an Arts Tasmania Professional have been published by The New York Times, GEO Germany, Development Fellowship, in 2018 Kylie undertook research into Australia Geographic, the British Museum, Smithsonian and the innovative contemporary art organisation models at Matt’s Gallery, Vatican Museum. She is currently studying a PhD in the School Studio Voltaire and other progressive art spaces in London. Kylie of Creative Arts, at the University of Tasmania. She is a founding has worked at Artspace in Sydney and has contributed to various member of the female-identifying photography collective Lumina. art advisory committees and panels in Australia.
TRACY PUKLOWSKI. At the time of judging, Tracy was the General Manager - Creative Arts and Cultural Services & Director of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston. She has since taken up the role as Senior Director of the National Aboriginal Art Gallery planned for in Alice Springs. Tracy has an MA (Hons) in Art History, and postgraduate qualifications in Museum Studies and Museum Leadership. She has held a range of senior position across regional and national cultural institutions, including Director of the National Army Museum of New Zealand, and Associate Director at the National Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa. Her Art History studies included specialisation in women artists and Australian art. Inclusive practice is core to Tracy’s practice as a cultural leader, and is also a central element of QVMAG’s development as a dynamic and thought-provoking museum and gallery. Under Tracy’s leadership, QVMAG is encouraging new conversations about its collections through sharing different perspectives and stories.
2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 07 ABIGAIL GIBLIN.
Late Summer Soak, 2021 Floral installation, documented and mounted to aluminium 67 x 100 cm
There’s a saying that time heals all wounds, but grief tells a different story. Time passes with each year marked by the natural rhythms of our surrounds; Wattle bursts in late winter, Blossom follows, paving way for our streets to be lined with vibrant Flowering Gum in late summer. There is no marker or end to which one will grieve for another. ‘Late Summer Soak’ reflects on the surreal life flowers take on when they become markers of loss, and utilises Flowering Gum to acknowledge the passage of time. Flowers play a significant role in how we deal with death, as we use them to speak for us when we have no words. The Hydrangea embodies this, as it becomes a physical mediator between the viewer and myself.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 09 ANDREA BARKER.
Femme, 2020-21 Porcelain 70 x 10 x 60 cm
My collections of objects are intended to create a space for contemplation and a sense of tranquillity where silence, stillness and restraint abide alongside a notion of simplicity and humility. An exploration and celebration of the poetics of feminine form, through the archaeology of the vessel and its remains allude to the beauty and strength of women through the ages from antiquity to the present. Each piece gently presents a sense of curve and balance enclosing space, time, memory and emotion.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 11 ANNE MORRISON.
Small Worlds, 2020 Acrylic on linen 122 x 137 cm
I live and work in Forth on Tasmania’s North West Coast. As an abstract painter I have been creating works in response to my local coastal environment and surrounding bushlands where I walk most days. ‘Small worlds’ is a painting which weaves together my experience of the bush after heavy rain and the tiny colourful forms often discovered bursting with life, hidden in the undergrowth. The fluid painting processes emerge as a primary metaphor in exploring the nature of geographic experience; how a place is known, remembered, understood and engaged with. For me, this evolves over time; a familiar place observed all year round, year in year out, in a continual process of transition and transformation. I aimed to explore ways to dissolve the world’s solidity by focusing on fluid painting processes to evoke complex patterns that mimic the rhythms of natural forces, echoing growth and form, airborne and waterborne particles, seeds, lichens, mosses, colonies of microorganisms, the branching networks of mycelium, energy and matter. This dynamic layering of fluid pigment invites the viewer to consider ‘landscape’ not as something fixed and static, but as a process or medium, a living system existing in a perpetual state of flux.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 13 CASSIE SULLIVAN.
Country is Calling, 2021 Giclée print on cotton rag 100 x 72 cm
Georgia stands on nuenonne Country, calling in our ancestors. Their presence appears as a bird, swooping and surrounding her. They are talking and we listen. As we exist here on the sand our ancestors have travelled for tens of thousands of years, we heal. We heal our family, we disrupt our colonisation, we unbury the past and we form new pathways forward. Georgia through education and activism, I through art and research, both of us through story. In her left hand she holds an animal skin and, in her right, a shell necklace, these are items of reverence and belonging that tie her to culture. This is what we look like now. Strong and sensitive indigenous women raising the voice of contemporary Aboriginal Tasmanians on an island that often feels isolated with a reflection that often feels distorted.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 15 DIANE ALLISON.
Fake Muse #1, 2020 Hand cut collected “Vogue” magazine covers 94 x 71 cm
‘Fake Muse #1’ consists of nine different “Vogue” magazine covers, gridded and hand cut into 5940 individual pieces. These tiny cells, assembled by hand, form a reinvented, pixelated cover which has increased nine fold. The new “super” model adorning the cover is a blended and blurred construct of the classic and often passive model pose of such images. It disrupts notions of perfection and beauty. It asks us to pause and reflect upon cultural, social, age and gender perceptions and to question the context, motives and accuracy of the vast array of imagery and information we consume.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 17 ELAINE GREEN.
Clouds in Flux, 2021 Oil on masonite 40 x 60 cm
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” Edgar Degas It is the ephemerality of clouds and mist and what might exist beyond that intrigues me. My interest lies in the fleeting nature of the elements, perceiving a certain moment and then attempting to capture its memory: the essence of that point in time. I aspire to convey the experience of being immersed in the clouds rather than making realistic representations of them. Creations born of experience and memory of place, my works begin as abstractions; manipulating oil paint, exploring spaces that exist only on the canvas, blurring and rubbing back, adding, and reducing until eventually a narrative is revealed. Always in a state of flux, clouds like memories indistinct, create an atmospheric poetry, if only momentarily. Rather than ‘framing Nature’ my work has always resonated the 19th century Romantic notion of elevating landscape painting to a metaphysical level. It is seen as the extension of an inner sense of being, a place where Nature and Self are fused. The difference between the observer and the observed is subsumed in a boundless luminosity. Like all artists I am constantly seeking the light, the troposphere, constantly in motion, provides never-ending inspiration and challenges to capture that light and the changing moods of the environment.’
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 19 ELOISE KIRK.
A Bruise for a Bruise, 2021 Collage, acrylic and resin on wood 50 x 40 cm
My work explores the unification of painting, collage and installation, sampling images of geological formations, waves and clouds. Through the use of erasure, fragmentation and collage I use a sequence of symbolic arrangements. The work is explicitly elemental, offering an aesthetic response to the juncture between natural beauty and fragility and testing the boundaries between the romantic and the surreal.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 21 ERIN BRANDALL.
Under Her Skin, 2021 Digital print 120 x 120 cm
An exploration into creating an ancestral archive, using monoprint self- portraits on ephemeral mediums. I endeavour to uncover the ghosts in my skin, by wiping away my painted face to reveal haunted traces of the faces underneath. The faces of my matrilineal ancestors emerge to remind us that we are the sum of many parts, many stories, many traumas, and many forgotten histories. My work involves accumulation and discovery of inherited matrilineal trauma and exploring methods of exorcising these traumas. Matrilineal investigation has led me to discover 8 convicts on my mother’s side, who nobody in my family knew about. These convict stories enrich my practice as I become connected to my history and sense of place. My projects explore the feminist perspective of motherhood, fertility, infertility, child loss, poverty, abuse, patriarchal systems of oppression and erasure, inherited intergenerational matrilineal trauma, exorcism, and resilience.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 23 EVA NILSSEN.
Body bits, 2018-20 Waste soft plastics variable dimensions
‘Body bits’ was created from household soft plastic waste, woven whilst encircling the artist’s body. A plastic bag seems flimsy, disposable, and inconsequential. Yet when many are gathered together and twisted into a firm twine, interlocked and held by the power of their material qualities plastic bags become weighty. A human sized void within the work looms - invisible, but palpable - like the many hours of labour that went into its making. By transmuting feelings of suffocation and frustration at the illogical position of being both a destroyer and a protector of the environment, the artist mirrors the repetitive activities of everyday life in which we as consumers intend to protect ourselves and our loved ones, yet damage the environment and the climate in the process. Eva Nilssen is a nipaluna/Hobart-based contemporary artist, whose practice interrogates the strangeness of embodiment as a way to address broad issues such as inequality and anthropogenic climate change. Eva uses video, still images, and objects to conjure the uncanny echoes of everyday life, in order to address the shadowy territory of our motivations and assumptions. Eva completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts with First Class Honours at the Tasmanian College of the Arts for which she received a University Medal.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 25 GABBEE STOLP.
Poison Oak, 2021 Lead sheet, she-oak seed pods, velvet, cotton thread two objects: 5.8 x 13 x 2.4 cm; 4.5 x 9.5 x 2.5 cm
A valley thick with oaks: This is the meaning of the word ‘derwent’ in the Brythonic Celtic language. A coloniser named the river I look at every day, after the one flowing through his hometown in England. I wonder what led him to choose that name for this river in 1793, the surrounding area not being thick with European oak trees. Was it sheer unoriginality or perhaps purposefully territorial? I suspect a bit of both. The River Derwent was once thickly lined with she-oaks, completely unrelated to the European oak. These native trees have largely given way to suburbs, farmland, dams, and factories. I watch the river every day and think about the way it may have once been and the way it must have changed. Despite all the change in and around it, it shimmers and flows, breathes and bursts out into the ocean. It goes on regardless.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 27 GEORGIA MORGAN.
This dream is real, 2020 Fine art inkjet print 120 x 80 cm
Georgia Morgan’s ‘This dream is real’(2020) is a documented site- specific sculpture that references the Malaysian kampong (village) her mother grew up in. The work is an exercise in making tangible things the artist has never seen to exist. Once erected by the Brisbane river, the lo-fi junk sculpture becomes a fathoming device - superpositioning time, place and the parallel experiences of a mother and daughter. There are no photos of her mother’s kampong and so the artist solely relies on her mother’s words and memories via Skype conversations. In the artist’s words: “She is remembering and I am imagining.”
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 29 GEORGIA SPAIN.
Six Different Women, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 110 x 95 cm
The painting ‘Six Different Women’ was initially inspired by a scene describing the maenads in Greek mythology – a group of women running wild and making mischief in the forests and on the mountainside. My intention in this painting was to depict a more tender moment between the women, as a nod to the power of female relationships and female friendship. I am interested in finding moments of abstraction within figurative painting and using narrative and storytelling to examine the cultural, political and personal. I am interested in the emotional and performative exchanges between people in social and psychological spaces and my work often references literature, film and popular culture. Born in London, UK, Georgia Spain grew up in Melbourne and is now based in Sandford, Tasmania. Spain is an early career painter who holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts. She has been involved in various group and solo exhibitions and is represented by The Egg & Dart.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 31 JANE GIBLIN.
My Mother Judi, by My Self, 3, 2020 Ink and pigment on Arches 114 x 114 cm
After four years of research into my father’s family my mother Judi asked if I might deal with hers. This work comes from a series of responses to her query. For years she has suffered a range of illnesses, the recovery from which has been undermined by a serious car accident. Her chronic pain is measured by her determination, grit and her ever valiant desire to conceal. Occasionally she drops her guard, and we see some truth.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 33 KARIN CHAN.
The Ascension, 2020 Archival print 65 x 110 cm
As a reflection on the emotional journey of living as a woman in this contemporary world, my visual practice explores the creation of inhabitation of both physical and psychological spaces. These spaces are where I can reflect, play and feel empowered, away from worldly confinements. The subjects chosen are objects and environments that relate to my emotional world. They are the tools that I used to address my feelings of love, fear or struggles. I am using them to create fictitious spaces as I release personal emotions in search for healing and inner peace. This work, ‘The Ascension’, contemplates the reconciliation of my emotions, striving to overcome negative feelings hindering the full expression of, and reception of, affection as a woman. It aims to deliver a mysterious and magical space aiming to provide spiritual liberation and empowerment for myself to continue loving in this real world.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 35 KELLY AUSTIN.
Stilled Composition 83, 2020 Porcelain, stoneware, timber, acrylic paint 120 x 38 x 32 cm
A small vessel stands witness near an enclosed, domed cylinder. Friction is activated between the recognisable and the abstract. My work explores illusion, the relationships of ceramic objects in compositions and how an understanding of one object may influence the perception of another. Propositions are constructed through placement and proximity, harmony and discord. Vivid white pulls towards pale celadon, interrupted by orange and yellow. Movement sits alongside stillness in a conversation with balance.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 37 KELLY MARIE SLATER.
Pumphouse Native Rock Road, 2020 Photographic print on aluminium substrate 91 x 61 cm
This river currently called ‘Mersey’ has become entwined with my life, as a constant yet evolving presence in my thoughts. It has sustained life and spirit in this region for millennia, shaping the land and the lives of the people who depend upon it. The river we know, the one we can see, is wide and placid. Subdued by dams and bridges it meanders through broad agricultural valleys. But beyond our view there is a river few of us know: A wild river running through deep gorges and forests. This river is an embodiment of our society’s dependence on natural resources. It is part of a fundamental earth system that humans cannot exist without. I want to know this river more deeply, beyond the purely physical environment. I want to explore the essence of the river in the seen and unseen places, the sublime and the mundane.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 39 KYLIE ELKINGTON.
Passaggio Cunninghamii (Nothofagus cunninghamii, Cradle Mountain), 2020 Oil on linen diptych: 184 x 112 cm (panels: 92 x 112 cm each)
My depiction of landscape is often afocal, sometimes devoid of horizon, often merging as if viewed from amongst, or from above. ‘Passaggio, cunninghamii, (Nothofagus cunninghamii, Cradle Mountain)’ represents a continuation of my exploration into the depiction of native plants, particularly those found in Tasmania. Passaggio in classical music refers essentially to transitions in vocal register, whilst maintaining an even timbre throughout. Similarly, Nothofagus cunninghamii exhibits such behaviour in our forests. One of two from the Nothofagus genus, native and proliferating in wilderness areas in Tasmania.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 41 MEG WALCH.
Orchidelirium, 2019-20 Oil and enamel on archival composite sign writing panel 90 x 150 cm
The origin of the word Orchid comes from the Ancient Greek ὄρχις (órkhis), literally meaning “testicle“ because of the shape of the root. But they are actually hermaphrodites. Orchids are resilient: they are improvisers and mimics. They can self-fertilize and do impersonations to lure pollinators. They feed on rotting matter. They are shape-shifters who traffic in metaphor. This orchid has evolved to become a futuristic bloom nourished by the transformation of decay, composting ‘the old’ to give birth to ‘the new’.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 43 MISH MEIJERS.
Protest series: Resistance, 2021 Oil on reverse acrylic (Hinterglasmalerei) mixed media on paper, framed 100 x 130 cm
I am particularly interested in the dynamic of groups, and especially when they are moving co-operatively in the achievement of a common goal. The protest series is an ongoing topic that I revisit in my work. This often manifests as imagery taken from protests and other organised political actions. This particular painting is an assemblage of recent marches across the globe on women s issues, superimposed into one vocal conglomerate of resistance, to represent the power of collectivity. Mish Meijers is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice experiments in surface tensions: how one material conforms or abrades against the matter of another. Whether in actuality, or within conceptual content, she distorts the inherent worth and significance of her objects with regard to popular culture, gender determination and functionality, in an alchemic and at times discordant sensibility.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 45 MOLLY WOOF.
Seagull Sashimi, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 52 x 76 cm
Everyone and everything just want a piece, without having to think of the consequences. ‘Seagull Sashimi’ explores the grotesque nature of greed and our unconscious desire to consume, for this work I have drawn a tenuous connection between these human traits and the observed behaviour of seagulls who are always on the lookout for the next new edible. Often fiercely fighting one another for a scrap, without the knowledge of what is being offered to them, mouths open and ready to receive. Putting all faith in the ones that have come before them, blindly hoping that yes, it is a chip.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 47 NANCY MAURO-FLUDE.
Our Motherboards are Temples, 2021 Framed Giclée print on canvas, Paraphernalia 83 x 52 cm
‘Our Motherboards are Temples’ captures a glimpse into a familiar routine, an embodied ritual with a personal computer. Amongst an ‘altar’ of paraphernalia, a woman at her escritoire, navigates through a cosmography of analogue and digital networks: weaving plans, communicating, and participating in a choreography of post dramatic happenings. An evocative object, the computer is an autopoietic device. Describing ‘subjective side’ of people’s relationships with technology feminist philosopher Sherry Turkle (2007) talks of computers as “intimate machines” that are “experienced as both part of the self and of the external world.” The techno-cultural imbroglios encountered by many of us in the over-reliance on our computers to enable various capacities of work, life and socialising during the C-19 pandemic compels us to renew questions around our relationship with human and non human actors, interspecies entities and tangential assemblages formed with corporeally distant and local agents. The work is also a curtsy to the provenance of materiality and make up of contemporary computational devices - the metals, particles, and molecules from which they extracted.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 49 NICOLE ROBSON.
August 28, 2021 Giclée print 80 x 120 cm
This work is from a series titled ‘Dirty Linen’. Airing your dirty linen is an old idiom, exploring the idea of exposing intimate details from our private lives, publicly. I am interested in the idea of linen containing the residue of family secrets. ‘Airing’ your dirty linen is allowing public scrutiny of something that is personal. The sculptural quality of the finished work supports a growing interest in the hybridising of the photographic medium. While referencing historical wet photography, this work is process driven, guided by the material qualities of the printed surface of the fabric. I have always loved polaroids, they are instantly an object and a photograph, you can hold it in your hand, a moment of time. By transferring the images to fabric, just like a polaroid lift or transfer, these works become photographs and objects. The literal materiality of the work, coupled with the reproduction style, allows for the images to be scrunched, folded and layered, further obscuring the hidden truths and suggesting a degree of separation, something discarded or hidden away in a draw.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 51 ROSIE HASTIE.
Andritz, 2021 Inkjet print on Platine fibre rag 77 x 105 cm
My anxious mind is always in desire of purity and absoluteness, something that cannot and does not exist. Truth and deception lies at the heart of my work. ‘Andritz’ is a constructed space which can only be inhabited by the imagination, and never actually exist. ‘Andritz’ explores photography’s ability to transport the viewer to a new place though the experience of colour, light, texture and space with the use of merely paper and the modern vaporiser. The ‘paperscapes’ conjure feelings of wonder upon closer inspection but reveal oddities in their detail. Similar to being awoken from a dream, the mind inhabits a place that can only exist in your mind, only to be taken out of it and thrown back into reality.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 53 SELENA DE CARVALHO.
Phases, 2020 Carbon ink, Vatnajökull glacier water, beeswax, plasterboard, charcoal and 23carat gold leaf 3 panels: 30 cm (diameter)
For this work, ‘Phases’, my material attention is focused on communicating engagement with climate instability and sensitivity to place, embodying uncertainty while also recognising deep-time cycles of change. I visited frontline environmental sites of disturbance, both in lutruwita/Tasmania and abroad. I had a sleeve made for my car exhaust, which I used to collect particulate matter to create the black ink. Attempting to translate moving through the environment as a contemporary human, my relationship with Earth, while at the same time being complicit in activities that render the world (as we know it) vulnerable, this carbon ink was mixed with water drawn from Vatnajökull, a melting Icelandic glacier. Each ‘Phase’ is adorned with beeswax and white pigment sourced from plasterboard found in skip bins, burnt surfaces of charcoal and 23carat gold leaf gifted to me. Precious material fragments that combine hopelessness with the inevitable ‘Phase’ of massive change we are living through. Blending poetic fiction and reality, the project embraces a sense of hopelessness in order to more readily accept inevitable extinction. The desire to reconcile my relationship with the world around me is juxtaposed with that “world” being put at risk by humankind itself.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 55 SHAUNA MAYBEN.
Golden wreath, 2021 Wreath: Sterling silver oxidized, gold paint, 24ct gold leaf, plastic and a 0.35ct GHsi natural diamond. Image: digital photograph image: 120 x 80 cm, wreath: 50 x 50 cm
Throughout my practice I have explored jewellery and its function, not only to adorn, but its artistic and intrinsic value emotionally and sentimentally. Jewellery is one of the oldest modes of creative expression—it predates cave painting by tens of thousands of years and throughout time has been used for personal adornment, status, power and currency. My piece is a continuation of a theme of work exploring the beauty of currency, the exquisite detail, colours and subject matter, as well as the social complexity of money. This particular work is made up of 24ct gold $50 Australian notes in the form of a wreath, the leaves in the shape of the Tasmanian blackwood wattle. Wreaths were used traditionally in a ceremonial victory procession granted to generals riding in a chariot drawn by four white horses. Behind the Victorious general stood a slave, holding a golden crown of leaves over his head and whispering to him throughout the procession, ‘Remember you are mortal’. This was to remind the protagonist that everything is fleeting and that life can be fragile and transitory even in triumph. This work is contextualised to celebrate as well as question human achievements that form a continuum from ancient cultures and traditions to today’s political, social and environmental tapestry.
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2021 EXHIBITION womensartprizetas.com.au 57 CONNECT WITH US. womensartprizetas.com.au