Past Winners

Artist Statement

Embracing Nature, using it as a tool in her practice. Depicting at once, the interior and exterior landscape. A portrait of humanity and the land we live within.

In 2022 Cape travelled across the Simpson desert but was forced by severe flooding to flee South, across ghostly salt lakes, bushfire blackened landscapes, and through the blood red soaked iron mountains of the Flinders Ranges. Using collected natural materials from along the way Cape has sought to find the space between the beauty and the horror of the landscape and the terrifying power of the elements.

About Sophie Cape

Since graduating from the National Art School in 2011 Sophie Cape has become one of the leading contemporary artists of her generation. Prior to pursuing her passion for art making Cape was a distinguished athlete in both downhill skiing and sprint cycling for Australia. After years of sport related injuries, Cape redirected her intense emotional and physical energies into her art practice.

Honoring her attachment to the outdoors Cape developed a practice of working in and with Australia’s ancient landscapes. Developing a unique language in her abstract works.

Engaging the body’s physicality and the natural Elements in order to render an authentic, instinctual act of expression. Depicting at once, the internal and external landscape. A portrait of humanity and the land we live upon. Seeking out the contrast of survival and decay, beauty and horror. In the hope of offering an encounter with the human condition in all of its power and poetry.

For Cape, the process itself is the most significant part of the journey. A cathartic and private performance in her authentic search for the Sublime.

Cape has held multiple solo exhibitions at OLSEN Gallery, Sydney, and won many prestigious art prizes including the Portia Geach Memorial Art Award. She has been featured on Australian Story, and awarded a multitude of residencies from Paris, Rome, Austria, Poland, Hong Kong, China, Italy, to throughout Australia. And is represented in many corporate and private collections nationally and internationally.

Artist Statement

Plastic can be found everywhere on the planet. It is estimated that up to 13 million metric tons of plastic ends up in the ocean each year. Microplastic particles have even been found in human blood and lungs. This work, in which I have blended my own still life and landscape photographs with artificial intelligence, comments on the intersection between nature and technology, speaking to the devastating impact of human activity on the environment. Ghostly gums enveloped in sheets of clear plastic struggle to survive in a denatured landscape, urging us to protect the natural world for future generations.

About Katherine Boland

Katherine Boland lives in Merimbula on the Far South Coast of New South Wales and she works across the disciplines of painting, photography, digital media and generative AI art. Since the 2019/20 Black Summer bushfires Katherine has been compelled to make art to raise awareness about climate change and the ecological perils facing the planet. In 2020 she was invited to participate in OUTPUT – Art After Fire, an international pilot project supported by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade through their Cultural Diplomacy Grants Program, which assisted artists in southeast Australia and the American West to create artwork about their bushfire experiences.

Katherine’s work has been included in several international climate art exhibitions, including the DigitalArt4Climate Art Prize at the 2021 United Nations Climate Conference in Glasgow and the Art Speaks Out Exhibition at the 2022 United Nations Climate Conference in Egypt. Katherine was this year’s recipient of the Burrinja Climate Change Biennale Art Prize and the Reimagine Art Prize People’s Choice Award.

Artist Statement

This woven swaddled form signifies Hope.

Across the world, the Earth is the Mother Spirit and we are her children, swaddled in her blessings.
When we harm the environment, we strip from ourselves that which sustains us, and steal from the generations to come.
The light emanates from the heart of this form, radiating hope that we can find a new way to embrace sustainable living, learning from both the modern and ancient wisdom, and passing a better world to our children.

The plant materials used in this woven piece were grown in the artist’s garden and prepared by hand.

About Lyn Davidson

Lyn Davidson is an Australian weaver and fibre artist of Irish descent living and creating respectfully on Ngunnawal Country, Canberra, ACT.

Lyn’s preferred medium is harakeke, also known as New Zealand Flax (phormium tenax). Her plant materials used for weaving are lovingly nurtured, grown, harvested, and prepared by hand. A sustainable, holistic view of love and care for the environment lies at the heart of her work. She finds the preparation and weaving of her materials to be a mindful, meditative, and soul-nourishing practice.

Lyn often weaves freely, in tune with her weaving materials and her heart. However, she also aims to find her own style in connection to her Irish heritage through form and patterns inspired by Irish and Celtic textiles, basketry, history, and mythology while weaving with respect towards the materials, cultural protocols, and traditional practices taught by her Māori teachers and mentors.
Through learning to weave using plants from her garden, and opening her heart to the rhythms of nature, Lyn has found a growing sense of connection to her own ancestral cultural practices, especially around seasonal and environmental awareness and traditions which has strengthened her love for and connection with Mother Earth.

Lyn was taught Raranga (the Māori art of weaving) while living in Aotearoa New Zealand. She continues to learn and strengthen her connections with Māori culture as a member of Tūmanako Māori Cultural Group in Canberra.

Artist Statement

Bushfires cause the loss of lives, destroy homes and our stock. Public and private land, including 1.39 million ha of forests and parks, plantations and native timber assets and nearly three billion native animals killed or displaced during the last horrendous bushfires, it had an impact on all of us, how can one not forget the images and videos of injured animals.

But mother nature is working hard to return our flora and fauna back to us. I wish I could just “Knit One Tree, Purl One Tree” to help her along the way.

About Dawn Duncan-Smith

I entered Electronic & Graphic Design studies at Swinburne in 1996 and received the AGDA award in 2000. I started teaching media at Box Hill Institute that year.

Every Friday I watch a dedicated group of women go upstairs with their sewing machines and bags of thread. This was a calling to me so, for my professional development, I studied for one day a week for four years to obtain my Diploma of Textile Arts. I loved that too and never looked back.

In late 2013 I became redundant and in 2014 I was selected for the Artists-in-Residency program at St Vincent’s Hospital in Fitzroy Melbourne. This was a great opportunity for me to develop my art practice.

In February 2016 I had my first solo exhibition at St Vincent Gallery in Melbourne and presented a body of work dedicated to ’The Story of St Vincent’s.’ In 2019 St Vincent’s acquired all these works for their art collection.

I moved to central Victoria in 2018. Early in 2019 I had a solo exhibition at Meenyian Gallery in Gippsland. In 2019 I also exhibited at the Capital Theatre “A Colourful Stage of Remembrance” which was dedicated to selected persons of interest or events that have taken place over the ninety years or so of it’s history.

I’m inspired by many things; a moment, an artist, still life compositions, native flora and fauna, Australian history. I think that is lucky, I have a wide scope, I never get bored of ideas!

Artwork Information

• State: Victoria
• Dimensions: 115cm x 75cm
• Medium: Textiles

Artist Statement

Basket Making captures the patterns and textures of the basket weaves and of country. Essential to life on country, women in Dianne’s tribe would use baskets for all sorts of gathering and for travelling. With close inspection, the viewer will see representations of the basket weaves and also the vegetation around the rivers and micro detail of certain landscape features, such as dried and cracked earth seen as the creeks and billabongs dry up.

About Dianne Tchumut

Dianne Tchumut is a Marrithiel woman from the Litchfield and Reynolds area of the Northern Territory. In the early 1990s, Dianne was already immersed in art, often painting religious themes. Her work became highly regarded by international scholars, partly due to her Aboriginal Australian take on biblical history.

In 2005 while working at Merrepen Arts in the Daly River Community, Dianne was honoured to have one of her works chosen to appear on the GBP1.12 postal stamp.

In 2007, Dianne graduated from the Batchelor Institute with a Certificate in Visual Arts and Contemporary Craft. She was honoured to have one of her works featured on the booklet for the graduation ceremony.

Dianne artworks cover a range of subject matter including Barramundi Season or Atyalmerr and also subject matter associated with her culture and the country she comes from. Dianne tends to express her stories in monochromatic colours and pales andneutrals.

Dianne’s artworks are typically very detailed. With close inspection, the viewer will see representations of the dragonflies and also the vegetation around the rivers and micro detail of certain landscape features such as dried and cracked earth seen as the creeks and billabongs dry up.

Artwork Information

• State: New South Wales
• Dimensions: 150cm x 90cm
• Medium: Acrylic on linen

Artist Statement

The entanglement and hustle of tall dockside cranes loading and unloading ships… the whip of cables, grinding of cogs, and the smell of diesel haze….

About John Rowe

British painter, illustrator and author. Born in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, England. Studied at Richmond College of Art, London. Studied at Twickenham College of Technology. Studied at Epsom School of Art, Surrey. Studied at the Hochschule für Angewandtekunst, Vienna under Maria Lassnig.

Winner of many top international awards, including the GRAND PRIX, BIB & GOLDEN APPLE, BIB awards. 29 worldwide published illustrated children’s books. Many solo and mixed exhibitions throughout Europe. Top international jury work, lectures, book-signings, and readings. TV and radio coverage and appearances.

Living and painting in Sydney….

Artwork Information

• State: New South Wales
• Dimensions: 80cm x 80cm
• Medium: Acrylic, Crayon, & Pastel on a Birchwood Panel

Artist Statement

From a mass pile of a storm fallen native Casuarina being chewed through by an arborists kit, a pile of what would appear
to be nothing but scrap or fire wood, I find my prize. Two beautifully twisted and contorted roots, one long and the other
tall that somehow echo each other aesthetically. My immediate thought is not only the beauty but importance of a tree
section often overshadowed by foliage, flower and trunk that’s just as crucial but hidden underground. The found material
is mounted like a trophy on reclaimed blackened ceramics doing justice and creating awareness of Casuarina.

About Daniel Leone

Daniel Leone is multi-disciplinary artist based in Canberra Act Ngunawal and Ngambri country. Daniel has lived here all his life and derives his inspiration from from the local ecology where grasslands and eucalypt forests dominate . Through varying mediums including ceramics, sculpture, bonsai and woodworking, Daniel seeks to capture and create awareness of the surrounding country doing justice the native and wilderness. He sees his work and practice as a collaboration with nature often including and basing work upon found and salvaged objects that would otherwise be discarded or looked past.

Artwork Information

• State: Australian Capital Territory
• Dimensions: 110 H x 100 W x 30 D
• Medium: Reclaimed ceramics, slaved casuarina timber

Artist Statement

Women controlling their own sexuality is a taboo subject, this work teases the viewer’s perception of sweetness and innocence through the subject’s visual double entendre. Not relying upon validation of her actions, safe in free love and self-expression, confidently taunting the viewer, while playfully aware of her sexual power. She will not be slut shamed, or pigeonholed. Each of us has the right to exist without torment, exploring current pushes within gender politics, against a climate of sexual harassment and the right for each of us not to accept sub-par treatment, to be truly liberated and be ourselves.

About Janne Kearney

Janne Kearney lives in Geelong, Victoria, and is proudly represented by Flinders Lane Gallery, Melbourne. An internationally recognised realist artist, winning international and national art prizes, Janne has been a finalist in over 80 prestigious International and National Art Prizes. She has exhibited in Italy, Spain, USA, and the UK and her work is included in several important private collections around the world. She was selected as a finalist in the globally important BP Portrait Prize, National Portrait Gallery, London and was awarded the prestigious Fashion Week San Diego ARC Award. The ARC is the most important realist painting prize in the US and the Americas.
Most recently, Kearney was the 2020 winner of the Lethbridge 20,000, Queensland’s largest small-scale art prize.

Artwork Information

• State: VIC
• Dimensions: 100 x 100cm
• Medium: Oil on linen