The 28th Annual Art Prize Exhibition Catalogue

ART PRIZE EXHIBITION The King’s School Art Prize 20 May 2022

www.kingsartprize.com.au

It is with a sense of relief and renewed confidence that we emerge from the past two years dominated by the disruption caused by the global pandemic. Circumstances have caused for reinvention.

This includes The King’s School Art Prize. Once an award embedded within a weekend festival of activity, The King’s School Art Prize Exhibition has been recrafted to enjoy prominence on its own. Guests to Opening Night of the Exhibition now enjoy a stylish three course meal, surrounded by beautiful artworks featuring the Finalists for the $20,000 acquisitive prize. It is the perfect occasion to peruse the fascinating pieces all aiming to join the collection of 27 other stunning winners from previous years.

The role of deciding the winner from the 2022 selection will be undertaken by Guest Judge, Isobel Parker Philip, Senior Curator of Australian Contemporary Art at The Art Gallery of NSW. Whether you are a first time visitor to The King’s School Art Show or a familiar friend of the Show returning to be inspired by the creativity of entrants, we welcome you to The King’s School and trust that you will find work that fascinates and deeply connects with you.

Peter Allison Head of the Preparatory School

‘O RANGE VENUS’ STEVE LOPES STELL A DOWNER FINE ART | OIL ON C ANVAS

The King’s School has been a proud supporter of the arts for many years. This year, the School will be celebrating its 43rd anniversary of The King’s School Art Show and the 28th anniversary of the awarding of The King’s School Art Prize.

The King’s School Art Prize is a prestigious and anticipated art prize within Sydney.

The acquisitive award is currently valued at $20,000. It was established in 1994 and attracts entries from leading contemporary artists from across Australia.

Isobel Parker Philip is the senior curator of contemporary Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She was the Art Gallery’s representative curator for the 2019 edition of The National: New Australian Art and the Art Gallery’s An examination of previous winners of The managing curator for the 22nd Biennale King’s Art Prize highlights the eminence in of Sydney: NIRIN 2020. She is currently which this award is held. Former winners co-curating the forthcoming exhibition include Steve Lopes, Peter Churcher, Nicholas Daniel Boyd: Treasure Island with Erin Harding, McLean Edwards, Pepai Jangala Vink, curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art.

Carroll, Aida Tomescu and Ben Quilty.

Formerly the curator of photography, Isobel’s past curatorial projects include Shadow Catchers 2020–21, Hold Still: The Photographic Performance 2018, New Matter: Recent Forms of Photography 2016–17 and Imprint: Photography and the Impressionable Image 2016. In 2017 she was the coordinating curator of Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium. She has independently curated exhibitions in a range of institutional contexts, most recently Garden Variety: Photography, Politics and the Picturesque at the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria for the PHOTO 2021 International Festival of Photography.

Her writing has been published extensively.

Steve Lopes The King’s School Art Prize Winner 2021

The orientation of a plant or other organism in response to light, either towards the source of light (positive phototropism) or away from it (negative phototropism).

The Sacred Lotus is known for its incredible transition each year, rising from murky waters and transforming into a plant of incredible beauty.

Here the Sacred Lotus reaches skywards, to a place beyond the smoke and the fog, seeking light.

‘PHOTOTROPISM’ TAMARA DEAN | Michael Reid - Sydney + Berlin Archival Pigment Print on Cotton Rag Paper 120 x 160cm, $13,000

Like the lotus plant I have undertaken a huge and profound transformation in facing the challenges of the past two years and drawing strength from places inside myself that I didn’t know existed.

Reaching beyond the fears and anxieties of this time, profoundly changed, I draw strength from my environment and bend towards the light.

‘Bogong High Plains, Alpine National Park (4582/16)’ belongs to a series of large-scale, handprinted gelatin silver photographs by Amanda Williams. The series depicts the unique alpine sphagnum bogs and associated fens in the Alpine National Park in Victoria. These wetland environments, typically found in mountainous areas above the tree line, are defined by their interdependent ecosystem of plants and animals providing vital wildlife corridors and habitat refuges for many threatened plant and animal species.

‘BOGONG HIGH PLAINS, ALPINE NATIONAL PARK (4582/16)’ AMANDA WILLIAMS | The Commercial Gelatin Silver Hand Print on Fibre-Based Paper 110 x 138cm, $14,000

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The post-volcanic mineral terrain of the Australian alps resonates with the alchemical photographic process, in which light-sensitive silver compounds form an image on fibrebased paper. For Williams, the bogs and fens themselves – with their symbiotic acid and alkaline properties – echo photography’s fugitive life cycle and process. The delicate chemical balance that maintains the bogs is reminiscent of the artist’s engagement in the darkroom. The ecological focus that resonates throughout this series signals an awareness of the delicate balance between nature, human presence, and progress.

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International, national and local crises are considered through an intuitive gesture of mark making and the telling of story. The use of colour and form combined with a finessed approach to deconstructive technique creates an accelerated visual potency to the events of our time. BRENDEN SCOTT FRENCH

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“I have relied upon two underlying thoughts to frame my practice – myth and heresy - as a way of subverting and of problematising my own relationship to material, landscape and power. These two concepts invigorate a basic perspective bearing witness to the contemporary socio-political environment with a strong hint towards the dismantling of corrupted and corrosive hierarchies.

This new Speed Frame edition is the most topical work I have made in this series of panels. Importantly, I have set this work’s perspective during the timeline of 24/02 to 21/03, 2022. Visually exploring the distress of Solastalgia, it continues my examination into the importance of shelter and the home in the confrontation between love and loss, landscape and power.

‘SPEEDFRAME #22’ BRENDEN SCOTT FRENCH | Sabbia Gallery Kilnformed and Cold Worked Glass - Wall Panel 110 x 76 x 4cm, $11,000

International, national and local crises are considered through an intuitive gesture of mark making and the telling of story. The use of colour and form combined with a finessed approach to deconstructive technique creates an accelerated visual potency to the events of our time.”

Cassaria grew up in the Kalka community and attended school in Pipalyatjara. An emerging painter, her works tell the stories of her trips to the homelands of her grandfather Stanley’s country around the Wataru protected area, 100 kms southwest of Pipalyatjara, in Mamutjara (Western Australia) and Kunatjara (South Australia). This is where she goes on bush trips with her Mother Susan, Aunty Carol Young and other family and children for bush foods Maku, Tjala, Tinka and to dig for Punu.

Cassaria has been exhibiting her glass and works on canvas since 2019 in group exhibitions in Sydney, Alice Springs, Perth and in Adelaide as part of the Adelaide Festival.

‘NGAYUKU COMMUNITY I, 2021’ CASSARIA YOUNG HOGAN | Sabbia Gallery

She is an exciting young artist and has been included in many private collections in her short artistic career and her work is drawing the attention of curators and collectors within Australia and overseas.

Acrylic on Canvas - Stretched 122 X 122cm, $3,300

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“Painting shouldn’t have to explain itself”, says the artist, who consciously avoids didacticism or overt conceptualisation; instead lacing his paintings with personal experience orbiting family, friends, landscape and the everyday. There is a simplicity to such imagery that challenges us to refocus on the things that matter. Van Gogh once said, “I have nature, and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”

Inspired by the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the character this work is named after, the simple female form removes all pretence and instead presents my subject’s essence, ouvere and charm.

‘TRULY SCRUMPTIOUS’ JAMES ETTELSON | Arthouse Gallery Acrylic, Oil and Mixed Media On Canvas 152.5 x 127.5cm, $10,500

‘Two Paths’ comes from a larger body of work that depicts the Australian Landscape in an alternative way. The landscape is first experienced and documented by Rhodes, who then transforms this record of the landscape into a depiction of his memory and experience by projecting onto it through several of his studio techniques. Rhodes has printed ‘Two Paths’ by hand in the darkroom before applying oil paint onto the prints to give them a unique quality.

When applying the paint Rhodes uses no reference images to inspire him, instead he works entirely from memory. By working from memory, Rhodes is able to transform the simple document of the landscape into a depiction of his experience of Australia.

The multiple prints that depict two waterfalls represent the paths that one follows in life, never knowing when one’s path will join another.

‘TWO PATHS’ JAMES RHODES | Newcastle Art Space Oil Paint on Silver Gelatin 121 x 85cm, $2,900 6

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My practice speaks the aesthetic language of the age of information; the ubiquitous digital screen that ‘connects’ us all, but also remaining wholly committed to the tradition of the medium of oil paint… KATE BALLIS

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‘JACARANDA MIMOSIFOLIA’ JENNIFER KEELER-MILNE | Australian Galleries - Sydney Oil on Linen 92 x 198cm, $15,000

Exploring beauty and mystery inspired by natural forms has been my primary focus over the last 20 years. This has been through drawing and painting; using oil paints, that are inherently rich in colour. I use traditional oil painting techniques including the layering of many thin films of paint, one over the other. This manner of working enabled me to express the palette of the blossoming Jacaranda, a tree synonymous with Sydney. Flowering in Spring, it has been an uplifting presence in our environment after enduring the COVID winters. For this reason I wished to celebrate its form and colour.

I resonate closely with the words of Georgia O’Keefe when she said: “I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.”

30 years ago, the Voyager spacecraft was poised on the edge of interstellar space. Astronomer/author Carl Sagan, NASA, commanded it to turn its camera and take one last photograph of earth across the great expanse of 6 billion kilometres of space.

Sagan coined the phrase “Pale Blue Dot” in reflection of the photograph’s significance. His sentiment has rarely seemed more pertinent than in the past year. The historic images remain the most lasting symbols of humandkind’s fundamental connectivity in the face of almost overwhelming fragility.

‘SERENITY (ED. OF 8)’ KATE BALLIS | Arthouse Gallery Archival Pigment Print on Cotton Rag 153 x 103cm, $4,900

In attempting to articulate these BIG ideas, my practice speaks the aesthetic language of the age of information; the ubiquitous digital screen that ‘connects’ us all, but also remaining wholly committed to the tradition of the medium of oil paint… I employ colour, luminescence, gradient, mark making, focus, rotation, geometry and the spatial ambiguities that shiny and transparent surfaces create such as void, perspective, reflection and refraction and the inescapable implication of the spectator.

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The incompressible beauty of birds is something that endlessly fills my heart with joy.

Looking into the eyes of a red-cheeked cordon-bleu, I see a creature so magical in appearance that I sometimes find my mind asking: is it real? Yet these birds roam in their thousands in the drier parts of the tropical regions of Sub-Saharan Africa feeding on grass seeds.

The moments when I take a pause from the human world, sit in stillness and observe this beauty, I notice it slows my internal rhythms, frees me from the urge to relentlessly ‘do’ and reminds me of nature’s power to immerse us in the present moment while delivering a gift of peacefulness and awe.

‘RED-CHEEKED CORDON-BLEU’ LEILA JEFFREYS | Olsen Gallery

I hope that my portraiture reminds humans of the link between themselves and a universe that all living creatures are part of; and understand the natural world as something to seek out, cherish and protect.

Photograph on Archival Fibre Based Cotton Rag Paper 79 x 61cm, $2,200

For a long period of time I have been working on panel, canvas and paper. In the last few years I have pursued as part of my process, three-dimensional works. My most recent example of this work is ‘The World Around Us’ which consists of three ‘Cuboids’, each plinth standing at human height which take on a personified and intriguing three-dimensional rendition of my painted works on panel. This work is a non-objective work through which colour, shape and perspectival shifts observe the unbounded.

‘THE WORLD AROUND US’ LOUISE TUCKWELL | Gallery 9 Acrylic on Particle Board, 3 x sculptures (cuboids) 160 x 32 x 32cm each, $20,000

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The moments when I take a pause from the human world, sit in stillness and observe this beauty, I notice it slows my internal rhythms, frees me from the urge to relentlessly ‘do’ and reminds me of nature’s power to immerse us in the present moment while delivering a gift of peacefulness and awe. LEILA JEFFREYS

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This painting is part of the Wagilag Sisters Story telling how the two Wagilag Sisters came out of the southern interior and across the countryside to the Liyagalawumirr waterhole at Mirarrmina. The younger sister profaned the pool of Wititj (the great Olive Python) accidently allowing her blood to fall into the waterhole. Because of this, the women (and their children) were swallowed by Wititj.

‘DJERRKA GA WITITJ (GOANNAS AND OLIVE PYTHON)’ PHILIP GUDTHAYKUDTHAY | The Commercial

All the other sacred snakes stood up with their heads in the clouds talking to each other with voices like thunder. The Pythons discovered they had different languages and ‘skins’.

Wititj confessed to eating the two women; his own moiety falling to earth making a big depression in the ground. The big wind blew across the land making the first dry season.

Wititj was ordered by the snakes to vomit the women and children back up. When he did this he also vomited up all the water from the waterhole, creating the monsoonal rains.

Djarrka (goannas) feature in this painting as when the sisters travelled, this was one of the bush foods they ate.

Acrylic and Ochre on Canvas 120 x 99.5 x 2cm, $15,000

Rhoda is painting her grandmother’s story, the ancestral creation story ‘Piltai Tjukurpa’.

Two sisters, Wanyinta and Alartjatjarra, and their husbands, travelled the lands looking for food. The two women would travel far to dig and hunt and always returned with food for their husbands, on one particular occasion deciding they would eat some food before heading back to their husbands.

Their husbands became angry that their wives had not returned and decided to trick them by turning into two water snakes going into the water holes near the site. The men, in the form of water snakes, became angry and swallowed the two sisters.

‘PILTATI TJUKURPA’ RHODA TJITAYI | APY Gallery, Adelaide Acrylic on Linen 200 x 200cm, $7,300

The APY Art Centre Collective is a social enterprise made up of 11 Aboriginal owned and governed arts and culture organisations from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands. As a collective, these organisations work to increase income for Aboriginal artists and support the important work of art centres in APY communities.

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This work from the series ‘Hope’ is inspired by moments in nature that elicit a sense of wonder and awe, and rituals that symbolically immortalise late loved ones.

The repetition of marks and use of glitter and acrylic paint on reflective perspex, result in a work that pulses with a vibrant energy. Organic shapes and a symmetry that perhaps references the body or plant life capture facets of transcendence and remind us of the precarious state of the human and natural world. While this work references loss and grief, it also provides an opportunity for a sense of transformation and hope.

‘HOPE NO.10’ HELEN SHELLEY | Galerie Pompom Mixed Media on Perspex 120 x 100cm, $4,000

I travelled a lot as a kid constantly reorienting myself to new circumstances, faces and places. Belonging takes time, building relationships so I wasn’t so obvious. Sometimes there wasn’t enough time, remaining a stranger. I’ve accepted this itinerant feeling and see it as a positive.

When looking at a photograph I’ve made you’re looking at the world through my eyes. A world built on transition, uncertainty, not everything is visible or has a place. Rather than avoiding, this uncertainty holds promise of new ways of seeing, of being. In ‘Reflections (Orange with Stripe)’ the subject matter is hard to identify. Mirrors deflect our gaze; a vertical shadow of unknown origin defies perspective; the prominent dark stripe is a reflection of an object outside the frame. All these visual devices deny an impulse to identify what we are seeing.

‘REFLECTIONS (ORANGE WITH STRIPE)’ VIVIAN COOPER SMITH | Galerie pompom and Blockprojects Digital C-Type Print Framed Australian Hardwood and Ultra Vue Reflection Control Glass 60 x 84cm, $2,500 10

The uncertainty that this photograph engenders is an opportunity to rethink the relationship between images and their subjects or how images engage with and construct the world we live in.

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When looking at a photograph I’ve made you’re looking at the world through my eyes. A world built on transition, uncertainty, not everything is visible or has a place. Rather than avoiding, this uncertainty holds promise of new ways of seeing, of being. VIVIAN COOPER SMITH

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This is a story about Kaliny-Kaliny(pa) (the honey grevillea).

Wati Kutjara Wanampi (two male watersnakes), father and son, are living at Pukara, a waterhole in Western Australia.

Anangu tjuta, many people, come to the rockhole for the sweet water and the father wanampi says “go back to your own country”. The people leave and the father and son travel to Willuna where they camp for weeks. They return to Pukara and are sleeping when they hear a buzzing sound. Minyma Punpunpa the lady flies are making lots of noise as they buzz around the honey bush. Wati Wanampi gets up and goes to collect honey. It is there that the Wati Mututja (black ant) finds them and spears the Wati Wanampi son in the side.

‘MITTUNYA NGURA’ ANYUPA NELSON | Sabbia Gallery Acrylic on Canvas 91 x 122cm, $3,400

The son starts vomiting, and he vomits up all different types of honey grevillea in yellows and orange. There is KalinyKaliny(pa), Ultunkun(pa), Piruwa and Witjinti.

Colour continues to be both subject and content in Smith’s luminous paintings. Colour is active, bringing a refined precision to her orchestrations as well as making concrete for the viewer the ability to be astonished by unexpected combinations.

Smith’s paintings revel in the interaction of intense pigments.

Exacting arrangements of calibrated primaries pull and push the picture plane. Smith’s palette has reached to the extremes of the chromatic scale: both black and white have entered the game. Dark and turbulent paintings executed in late 2016 have been joined by new works such as ‘Consequences’, that are loaded with titanium white, exacting their colour play at the palest end of the spectrum.

‘CONSEQUENCES’ GEMMA SMITH | Sarah Cottier Gallery

‘Consequences’ speaks to the very ambivalence between the physical, static painting and the ephemerality that constitutes the work’s inception and viewer’s perception of it.

Acrylic on Board 117 X 137cm, $18,500

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Through a darkroom practice, I examine abstraction and intersecting paths with the history of photography. ‘Glimmer #2 & #3’, combines the historical Becquerel Daguerreotype process with a photogram methodology filtered by the contemporary dialogue.

‘GLIMMER (PICTURING OBJECTS) #2 & #3 FROM THE SOLO EXHIBITION ‘FAR FROM THE EYE’ DANICA CHAPPELL | Assoc. artist of Olsen Annex; Represented Sous Les Etoiles Gallery NY Daguerreotypes, Hand Gilded Palladium Wood Frame, Glass 42.5 X 85cm, $9,900

Nothing is as it seems when looking at a Daguerreotype.

Positive and negative images sit together on the same mirror polished, silver surface. The slide between these, for a total viewing experience, requires indirect positioning and the presence of black to be reflected in the surface.

My darkroom methods tend to occupy the photograph from peripherals and transferences based on photogram techniques, blended composites, colour/tone, pushing positive and negative forms together. The resultant pieces conflate the sculptural with the painterly and repurposing how we look, view and use the language of a photograph to describe it. Collapsing preconceptions, the visual expression is informed by a cadence between proximity and time in an abstracted narrative.

‘The Darkness of Enlightenment’ is a series of daguerreotype photographs that highlight Australia’s complex colonial history. Daguerreotypes were the first publicly available photographic technology used widely in the 1840’s and 1850’s.

In utilising this process to depict his ancestral Kaurna Country, Tylor complicates the way in which colonists recorded and laid claim to these unceded lands. The alchemical process of creating direct-positive images is suggestive of the merging of fact and fiction that becomes the commonly accepted history.

‘THE DARKNESS OF ENLIGHTENMENT (KARRAKARLINGGA CARRACKALINGA 1)’ JAMES TYLOR | N.Smith Gallery, Sydney Becquerel Daguerreotype 10 x 15cm, $5,500

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“I want people to understand that point of colonisation and how effective that was on Kaurna language, and what that feeling of loss and history and impact of colonisation has on the contemporary community, myself included. I also want them to feel it, to see it in a visual way and to be able to feel emotions about that, because it’s one thing to read this or be told this, it’s another thing to understand history, to feel history.

Sometimes you just have to feel things to understand them.”

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I also want them to feel it, to see it in a visual way and to be able to feel emotions about that, because it’s one thing to read this or be told this, it’s another thing to understand history, to feel history. Sometimes you just have to feel things to understand them. JAMES TYLOR

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The relationship of labour and art became a focus in Oliver Wagner’s methodology when he realised his process is monotonous, physical labour, mostly concerned with preparatory and preserving work. The creative act happens rapidly, sometimes within a few seconds.

Involving two approaches such as cascades of house paint dust and unplanned gestural compositions, his works are unexpected pictures. They are experiments with outcomes contrary to his expectations, that often leave him no choice but to accept them.

‘RECONSTRUCTED PAINTING 48’ OLIVER WAGNER | Sarah Cottier Gallery House paint dust on Linen 137.2 x 167.7cm Enquires to mtaylor@kings.edu.au

The production of his main working material, house paint dust, is reminiscent of the production of paint before the invention of the ready-made tube of paint, in which an apprentice of a master would grind the raw materials into pigment mixed with linseed oil. Wagner’s process reverses the industrially produced wet house paint into dry dust. Unlike pigment, dust is a composite of the three components - polymer, solvent and tint - which reflects the conventional material structure of a painting, consisting of support, medium and pigment.

The works of Dr Elizabeth Fulhame to the contribution of the establishment of the medium of photography are little known. Over more than fourteen years in the late 1700s, Fulhame experimented with an astonishing array of chemicals to attempt to dye fabric through chemical means.

Her experimentations with silver activated by light, were the precursor to the “discovery” of photography in 1839.

‘AN OBSERVATION OF SUNLIGHT, SILVER AND GLASS (HOMAGE TO DR ELIZABETH FULHAME) #1 AND #2’ YVETTE HAMILTON | Olsen Gallery Archival Pigment Print From Paper Negative 90 x 125cm, $2,200

In these works I pay homage to Fulhame through camera-less experimentations that combine glass, silversensitised photographic paper and sunlight. These modest experimentations are part of a larger series that notes the variations in light and time to the image. These works are part of an ongoing investigation into the photographic medium and continues my interest in expanded photography and materialising the invisible.

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George Byrne photographs Los Angeles in colour, outdoors usually in blinding sunlight. Any subject matter is fair game so long as it’s conducting light, and everything evokes.

Composition is king.

George Byrne started out studying painting, in his late teens he discovered a love of photography. He says his early creative inspirations came from Pierre Mondrian, Richard Diebenkorn, David Hockney and Jeffrey Smart, only later discovering Walker Evan, William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Andreas Gursky, Lewis Baltz and other New Topographic photographers. George Byrne is a photographer with a painter’s instinct.

‘MONOLITH PALM SPRINGS, 2021’ GEORGE BYRNE | Olsen Gallery Photographic Pigment Print on Archival Cotton Rag Paper, 121 X 149 cm, $6,850

Byrne’s habit is to spin LA’s most disposable architecture and redundant landscapes into seismic moments, he seeks the epic in the everyday and revels in the irony that is beautifying the unbeautiful. His images reflect a sense of stillness often echoed in Edward Hopper’s own investigations. The emptiness that can lie at the heart of a busy modern life, and those questions that often rest uncomfortably between the lines.

At the end of 2019, filmmaker and photographer Tim Georgeson embarked on the project ‘Truth in Fire’ in response to the catastrophic bushfires of the South East Coast of Australia. Using moving image, sound and photography Georgeson captured the environmental impact of an unprecedented number of fires initiated by thunderstorms across the Yuin Nation. Featured in this exhibition, the works ‘Requiem for a forest and Anthropomorphosis’ communicate the deep sense of loss felt by First Nations people and their path toward the healing of Country.

‘VICTOR’ TIM GEORGESON | Olsen Gallery Archival Pigment Print 100 X 127cm, $3,500

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Georgeson extended the project in 2021 when he met Victor Cooper (Guruwalu), a Minitja man, while travelling to Kakadu. Here the artist experienced the sensitive interplay between Aboriginal people and Country through cultural burning, practices that are founded on over 65,000 years of intergenerational knowledge. Georgeson’s images convey the use of fire in maintaining and revitalising an ecological balance, as well as its role in the regeneration of plant species.

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Geographies of space, atmosphere and physicality. It’s like magic when the unexpected starts to happen, it’s completely intoxicating. LARA MERRETT

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Seth Birchall’s paintings conjure meditative worlds that pulse with colour and life. His fictitious landscapes – composed from found photographs as well as sketches and memories of Australia and Bali – reflect a biophilic urge to connect with other life forms in nature. Drawing inspiration from a wealth of rich and unexpected sources, including romantic notions of landscape throughout art history, Birchall offers a contemporary twist on the gestural brushwork, moody light, and colour play of Expressionism and Impressionism.

‘OTHER LANGUAGES’ SETH BIRCHALL | Sullivan+Strumpf Oil on Canvas 184 x 244 cm, $18,700

His paintings entwine subtle nods to the atmospheric effects in works by Australian Tonalists such as Max Meldrum and Clarice Beckett, Romantic artist William Blake’s electrifying scenes of heaven and earth, 19th century French paintings, and Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints of the ‘floating world’.

These varied references collide in compositions that seem to shape-shift before your eyes, drawing viewers into the depths of a complex interior universe. His works act as portals for looking both inward to psychological states and outward to the natural world.

Lara Merrett works within an expanded field of painting, with as deep an understanding of the interplays of colour as those of surface in works of both intimate and monumental scale.

Within her colour fields, the artist imagines all the “geographies of space, atmosphere and physicality”, layering and pouring water-based materials directly in a process never fully anticipated, yet always transformative. For the artist, “It’s like magic when the unexpected starts to happen. It’s completely intoxicating.” Each work has its own personality and therefore takes its own time.

‘FOREST FORAGING (NATURE BANNERS), 2021’ LARA MERRETT | Sullivan+Strumpf

Merrett’s simultaneous agility, amplification and softening of the rigid confines of canvas and wall, both complicate and honour painterly traditions. Merrett often sworks in-situ, intuitively responding to the physicality of her surrounding space and architecture. The artist places great importance on process and collaboration.

Ink and Acrylic on Canvas and Linen 183 x 175cm, $18,700

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‘It Was the Best of Times’ continues my exploration of theatrical realism, utilising the still life genre of painting to discuss allegorical themes within art history and popular culture. The title is drawn from Charles Dickens’ novel, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’.

Two paper origami swans sit atop a bowl of onions. In Latin, inscribed on the Japanese folded paper, the opening lines from Dickens’ novel, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.’ Dicken’s words ring true in the ears of the present age of technological advancements and the global crisis unfolding in the world around us.

‘IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES’ JONATHAN DALTON | Nanda\Hobbs Oil on Linen 92 x 86cm, $13,000

‘Some Things Never Change’ is heavily influenced by weather patterns and futurism. His work has been described as somewhere in between abstract and realism, ethereal, minimal and modern. As a painter, I work to develop paintings that speak about the beauty and power that exists within weather patterns. I constantly find myself staring into oncoming storms. I do not merely want to capture the image with my painting; rather, with strong, bold strokes, I want to give it life and energy, also the sense of fiction and fantasy that one might see in an 80’s sci fi - powerful electricity, but with a tone of grace, softness and movement.

‘SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE’ BROOKLYN WHELAN | Nanda\Hobbs Mixed Media on Canvas 112 x 112cm, $8,500 16

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I constantly find myself staring into oncoming storms. I do not merely want to capture the image with my painting; rather, with strong, bold strokes, I want to give it life and energy, also the sense of fiction and fantasy that one might see in an 80’s sci fi - powerful electricity, but with a tone of grace, softness and movement. BROOKLYN WHELAN

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This painting ‘Dynamic Peace’ is the last work of a series titled, ‘Primordial Silence’.

This painting is a response to an inner landscape of oneness and connection. Our core being, beyond our thoughts, our beliefs. Our true self, beyond our ego self. Primordial Silence comes from this place, this vibrant, unbounded consciousness.

This silence though isn’t silent, it’s emerging fullness, it’s powerful energy. It’s vast, it’s healing. It’s dynamic Peace.

‘DYNAMIC PEACE’ MARIA GORTON | Twenty Twenty Six Gallery Oil on Linen 153 x 153cm, $7,500

I’ve always loved the economy of Fred William’s work, the way he could convey a sense of a landscape’s vastness with so little, sometimes just different sized knots of pigment.

I’ve had this old piece of plywood for years, part of an old painting bench, and I’ve always thought it had a bit of a Fred Williams feel to it. It was the starting point for this pared back assemblage floating in a canvas, playing on the idea of a horizon line broken by the foreground whilst receding to a vanishing point.

‘VANISHING POINT (AFTER FRED WILLIAMS)’ JAMES POWDITCH | Nanda\Hobbs Mixed Media 150.5 x 100cm, $12,000 17

‘PILGRIMS’ JUMAADI | King Street Gallery on William Gouache on Paper 85 x 145cm, $13,200

My practice usually relates to love, longing, displacement and the relationship between humans and other humans and humans with nature, as a way explore themes of history, personal memory, migration and colonialism. In this work, I look intimately at the movement of people and their impact on the natural environment and cultures. The triptych images of tree climbers, a big foot and an abandoned house are framed in a single composition where each image has the potential to tell an epic narrative as well as vernacular.

The idea and shape of each image in this work are inspired by the simplified form of the Indonesian gunungan.

In my practice, performance and painting go hand in hand; often they are not statements of discovery, rather as extrapolations of my curiosity and wonder, searching and forming ideas around love, longing and loneliness in our time.

‘UNDERCURRENT (3)’ PETA CLANCY | Dominik Mersch Gallery Framed Inkjet Pigment Print 150 x 106cm, $6,800

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Peta’s photographic work explores hidden histories of colonisation, events which threatened the survival of her ancestors aiming to bring to light these hidden histories in a contemporary setting. Clancy collaborated with the Dja Dja Wurrung community to explore unmarked and unacknowledged massacres sites on Dja Dja Wurrung Country.

Clancy spent a year responding to a site now submerged underwater; what she saw as a metaphor for the denial of the history of frontier violence in Australia. Through a process of cutting and layering, the resulting large format photographic series ‘Undercurrent’ draws out hidden histories and reveals the cultural and emotional scars that resonate from the past through to the present.

‘Undercurrent’ has been supported through the Koorie Heritage Trust’s Fostering Koorie Art and Culture Residency Program and the Federal Department of Communication and the Arts’ Indigenous Languages and Arts Program. Clancy wishes to acknowledge the cultural support and collaboration of the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation and in particular the generosity of Amos Atkinson and Michael Bourke.

All finalists’ artwork will be for sale, except for the 2022 Art Prize winner. If you are interested in purchasing one of these finalists’ pieces, please express your interest via email to mlt@kings.edu.au A personal appointment for viewing will then be organised. Alternatively, general viewing of Art Prize finalists is available on Saturday 21 May from 10.00am to 4.00pm in Horrocks Hall.

TAMARA DEAN

AMANDA WILLIAMS

BRENDEN SCOTT FRENCH

CASSARIA YOUNG HOGAN

JAMES ETTELSON

JAMES RHODES

JENNIFER KEELER-MILNE

KATE BALLIS

LEILA JEFFREYS

LOUISE TUCKWELL

PHILIP GUDTHAYKUDTHAY

RHODA TJITAYI

HELEN SHELLEY

VIVIAN COOPER SMITH

ANYUPA NELSON

GEMMA SMITH

DANICA CHAPPELL

JAMES TAYLOR

OLIVER WAGNER

YVETTE HAMILTON

GEORGE BYRNE

TIM GEORGESON

SETH BIRCHALL

LARA MERRETT

JONATHAN DALTON

BROOKLYN WHELAN

MARIA GORTON

JAMES POWDITCH

JUMAADI

PETA CLANCY 19

THE KING’S SCHOOL ART PRIZE RETROSPECTIVE WINNERS

2021 STEVE LOPES ORANGE VENUS

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SINCE 1994 THE KING’S SCHOOL HAS, THROUGH ITS PRESTIGIOUS ART PRIZE, ACQUIRED THE WORKS OF SOME OF AUSTRALIA’S MOST INFLUENTIAL AND INNOVATIVE CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS.

2020 PEPAI JANGALA CARROLL WALUNGURRU

2019 MCLEAN EDWARDS DINING IN

2017 PETER GODWIN PARIS APARTMENT

2016 DAVID FRANK POLICEMAN STORY

2014 GUY MAESTRI FERAL

2013 JUN CHEN BLOSSOMS NEAR KURANDA IN MIST

2018 BEC JUNIPER COVERED SCALDED GROUND

2015 JOHN BOKOR THE KITCHEN BENCH

2012 GEOFFREY DYER OCEAN BEACH

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THE KING’S SCHOOL ART PRIZE RETROSPECTIVE WINNERS

2011 EUAN MACLEOD CLIMBERS

2010 ROSS LAURIE RAM’S GULLY - BUTT UP

2009 GLORIA PETYARRE UNTITLED (LEAVES)

2008 RODNEY POPLE CRYSTAL CLEAR II

2007 NICHOLAS BLOWERS GUM AMONGST A TANGLE OF BUSH DEBRIS

2005 GEOFFREY DE GROEN TEN SQUARES

2004 BEN QUILTY ALBERT

2003 ASHLEY FROST KING STREET

2002 MARTINE EMDUR BRONTE BATHING NO 3

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2001 NICHOLAS HARDING MOONRISE AT THORA

2000 JOANNA LOGUE ESSINGTON

1999 PETER CHURCHER THE COLLECTOR

1998 JACQUIE STOCKDALE THE QUIET STAGE

1997 JASON BENJAMIN YOU’RE NOT ALONE

1996 JOHN OLSEN THE DROUGHT LANDSCAPE REPEATING MAN

1995 LYNDAL BROWN AND CHARLES GREEN THE NERVOUS SYSTEM

1994 AIDA TOMESCU GREEN TO GREY

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THE KING OF ALL SUVs Exclusive offer for The King’s School Community

THE KING OF ALL SUVs Exclusive offer for The King’s School Community. When you purchase any new or demonstrator Volvo, receive 5 years/75,000km complimentary scheduled servicing*, plus a $250^ donation to The King’s School.

Volvo Cars Parramatta

23 Church Street, Parramatta NSW 2150

T 02 8999 4397 MD049112

T&Cs. Offer only valid at Volvo Cars Parramatta on new and demonstrator Volvo vehicles. Flyer must be presented upon arrival at the dealership prior to time of purchase. *Complimentary scheduled servicing for 5 years or 75,000kms (whichever occurs first). ^$250 fuel voucher cannot be exchanged for cash, accessories or merchandise. Offer is not available to fleet, government or rental buyers, or in conjunction with any other offers and cannot be redeemed for cash. Offer excludes any XC40 or XC90 models and ends 31.12.22.

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ART PRIZE EXHIBITION THANK YOU 27

‘ORANGE VENUS’ STEVE LOPES STELL A DOWNER FINE ART | OIL ON CANVAS | THE KING’S SCHOOL ART PRIZE 2021 WINNER