Blacktown Art Prize Winners Announced

Congratulations Tess Mehonoshen, winner of the 2017 Blacktown City Art Prize.

Brisbane artist Tess Mehonoshen has won the 2017 Blacktown City Art Prize of $15,000 for her stirring sculpture Measuring Loss. Made from cement, clay, iron oxide and fabric, the work is a tactile rumination on loss, its blackened spectral form evoking images of mortality and environmental destruction. The judges referred to the sculpture as ‘slow release’, explaining, “the longer we spent with the work the more it touched on various subjects”.

Highly Commended were Carol Ann Fitzgerald for her painting Landscape and Memory – Wiradjuri Country, and Minka Gillian for Pink Outburst – A Self Portrait. Rooty Hill artist Kristone Capistrano was awarded the Local Artist Prize for his drawing Breath, a charcoal rendition of a newborn baby that, in the judges’ words, “pointed to the future of multiculturalism in Blacktown”.  First prize in the Aboriginal Artist category was Naomi Grant for her abstracted aerial landscape Dad’s Country, which fuses Indigenous painting techniques with Western agricultural motifs. Peter Hinton won Highly Commended for Quality of a Few Minutes #1 and 2 – A Study on Whitlam.

Now in its 22nd year, the Blacktown City Art Prize is an annual award inviting local, regional and national artists to submit work across a spectrum of mediums. Artworks by this year’s ninety-three finalists will be on display at the Leo Kelly Blacktown Arts Centre. The winning works were selected from a record number of 602 entries by the judging panel, who comprised Khadim Ali (artist and Blacktown resident), Dominic Mersch (gallery owner and arts advocate) and Felicity Fenner (curator, academic and Director of UNSW Galleries).

EXHIBITION
Blacktown City Art Prize
2 December 2017 – 27 January 2018
The Leo Kelly Blacktown Arts Centre

Images courtesy the artists and the Blacktown Arts Centre, NSW.