Where should I start?
Well, like a CV, I’ll start with the most recent.
On Saturday, 29 September 2024 the JADA opens when the winner will be announced. I am thrilled to be a finalist in this very prestigious Biennial Art Prize which is held at the beautiful Grafton Regional Gallery.
The 2024 Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award (JADA) celebrates contemporary Australian drawing at its finest. The nation’s leading regional drawing prize, with an acquisitive first prize of $35,000 and early career award of $5,000, this exhibition is the flagship of the Grafton Regional Gallery.
The JADA champions innovation and excellence in drawing and showcases the enduring importance of drawing practice in Australia. This year’s exhibition features works from 65 artists, whose approaches to drawing span the technical and traditional, through to the experimental, conceptual and performative.
28 September – 8 December 2024
My submission is representative of my ongoing practice as an experimenter of ideas, mediums and messages. I can’t sit still.
“Walking with Words” continues my interest in combining text and print with paint, line, ink and collage, and taking into consideration what the intangible, such as sounds, might look like and how can I represent them visually.
My statement accompanying this work:
I am numbed by the state of our world and bemused by the way words are manipulated and deliberately misused.
I am pondering the importance and potency of words. Words can be barriers which either keep you out or keep you in, imprisoning you or freeing you. Words can be liberating or they can become unwelcome obstacles.
I have selected words and the letters of words from an unintelligible language and used them as pattern. As picture elements, they are useful due to their neutrality. To add to their neutral presence, I have placed them upside-down and I have likened them to a compact bush landscape. I am imagining that I am finding my way through dense trees similar to manoeuvring my way through false and fake information. While there is a sense of claustrophobia, anxiety and helplessness, my optimistic self wants this work to offer some hope for our future.
NEXT
Every now and then, I take time out to do some observation drawing. It’s relaxing and doesn’t require quite as much brain space, something I seem to be running a bit short on recently.
Drawing is so important. It’s like the fitness that one needs to stay on top of your game. Drawing can be used as a warm-up, as a meditation, as medication, as the final prize.
My drawing of Stuart was and is all of those things.
charcoal and pastel on Steinbach paper adhered to canvas 76x61cm
Commended Award in the Tim Copes Portrait Prize at the Bowral Art Gallery.