WINNER

Artist Name: GLENN HUNT

Artwork Title: FREEDOM FIGHTER

Medium: Photography

Size: 100 x 75cm

About the Artist:

Glenn Hunt is a multi-disciplinary photographer with a career spanning 30 years. He has won many awards, including the Humanity Awards, Photographer of the Year, Australian Photography Awards and the Brisbane Portrait Prize (digital). He has also been a finalist in the Clayton Utz Art Award, Martin Kantor Portrait Prize, Moran Prize, and Hasselblad Masters. He lives in a converted church on Brisbane’s Northside where he makes many of his portraits.

Artist Statement:

Imprisoned in Egypt for 400 days, journalist Peter Greste paid a heavy price for doing his job. After a public campaign, Greste was returned to Australia in 2015. An award-winning foreign correspondent for 25 years, he now holds the UNESCO Chair in Journalism and Communications at UQ, and advocates for press freedom.

The slightly unbalanced pose, off-centre and leaning forward, shows both fragility in the pose and the weight of the surrounding space.

And although Greste says his prison days were “a struggle over press freedom, and not about anything personal,” the lighting in this portrait hints at the many difficulties experienced on a personal level.

Judge’s Comment:

Extraordinary image of Peter Greste.

PEOPLE CHOICE

Artist Name: AMY BRIDGE

Artwork Title: PURE JOY

Medium: Pencil, Watercolour, Ink on Paper

Size: 86 x 86cm

Price: $10000

About the Artist:

By playing with textures and depths using mixed media, I enjoy bringing fine detail to my artworks whilst using broader strokes to invoke a 'painted' impression. I view all things in life as potential art, believing the beauty of things becomes art when we make it so.

Artist Statement:

I wanted to reflect pure, unapologetic joy and to give this feeling to the audience that views it. Using a monochromatic palette, the minute details have been blurred away from perfection to focus on emotion. To live in the moment is an animal instinct, something every human can learn from.

Judge’s Comment:

Amy Bridge is an Australian contemporary artist. Based in Brisbane, Queensland, Amy specialises in artworks using pencil, pastel, watercolour and ink. Amy has been a finalist in the Brisbane Portrait Prize (Salon) and Lethbridge Small Scale Art Awards. Her work has attracted clients internationally, with works commissioned from France, Scotland and Canada.

HIGHLY COMMENDED

Artist Name: MATT JAMES

Artwork Title: ALWAYS PASSING US BY

Medium: Oil on canvas

Size: 100 x 100cm

About the Artist:

My paintings are based on pencil and oil sketches created in situ, from photographs, and my recollection of the location. My work represents actual places but is often constructed from memory and my impression of the environment. I am interested in exploring the shape of the landscape, the movement of clouds, the perception of distance, and the shifting of the light. Experimentation with mark-making is important to my work – I use brushes and palette knife strokes to represent direction, movement and focus to influence how the audience views the work. Contrasts in paint texture and thickness add visual interest and allow me to move between figurative and abstract representation.

Artist Statement:

This work represents my continued exploration of reflected landscapes' energy, movement and drama. The work is intended to have a slightly menacing feeling and alludes to the fact that the world often rushes past us, largely unnoticed. The marks are instinctive, almost hurried. Large paint strokes, often crossing over each other feel disjointed close-up but somehow work together when viewed from further away.

Judge’s Comment:

Graphic designer from Wales

HIGHLY COMMENDED

Artist Name: MIRANDA HINE

Artwork Title: BELL WITH KATH THE CHOOK

Medium: Oil on board

Size: 23 x 15cm

Price: $2000

About the Artist:

Miranda Hine is an early career artist, curator and writer from Meanjin/Brisbane. Her works are forms of personal documentation that reference cataloguing and collection techniques used in museums. Through her paintings she investigates our instinct to create stories and connections when objects, text and images are placed together.

Artist Statement:

The thought of my little sister, Bell, having something to hold during Canberra’s extended lockdowns was comforting. She’d moved there, away from her family in Meanjin/Brisbane, just before the pandemic and occupied her time at home growing vegies and tending to her chooks, Kath and Kim.

Judge’s Comment:

As an extension of my curating, writing and research practices, my art practice investigates how forms of authority, such as museums and documentaries, construct values and narratives.

HIGHLY COMMENDED

Artist Name: CAROLYN CRAIG

Artwork Title: PROXIMAL NOISE

Medium: etching

Size: 98 x 100cm

Price: $3000

About the Artist:

Carolyn Craig is an interdisciplinary artist from Queensland examining relational economies of power, in particular how they enact privilege. Her current research harvests the residue or trace of bodily acts to explore transitory zones between social classes. She is currently a Director at Frontyard Projects, Sydney and teaches at the National Art School, Sydney in the Printmaking Department. She holds a PHD from the Queensland College of Art.Her work has been a finalist in prizes such as the Burnie, Freemantle, Silkcut, Clayton Utz, Churchie, Ravenswood Women’s, Bangkok Drawing and Print Triennial and she has been awarded the Marie Ellis, Swan Hill and M16 prizes.

Artist Statement:

This work considers how the breathe /voice are sites of privilege through the idea of social anoxia (a slow suffocation from social constriction). I use the idea of ERV or the amount of excess air that we are unable to inhale or exhale, as an social accounting equation. Victims of violence , poverty/pollution, and fear live in bodies that struggle to breathe fully. They are bounded within a social value/valve that restricts their oxygen allowance – via economic , environmental and violent methodolgies. Subjects with higher asset value tend to breathe cleaner air, study yoga on the weekends and take hold of air values as a right. Breathe takes us to the edges of everything. I want to breathe.