Emerging Artist Prize virtual exhibition

Lachlan Bell

These photographs by Lachlan Bell are set in regional Australia. The forgotten graves in a country churchyard, and the rusting petrol bowsers superfluous in a modern world, stand like sentries protecting memories embedded in the landscapes of lives past.

Mara Braun

During Melbourne’s biggest Covid-19 outbreak last year, many artists continued their practice from the confines of home. Mara Braun captured the surreal and lonely experience of the harsh lockdown by turning the view from her window into a canvas. Ghostly and ephemeral, these uncanny projections literally cast “new light” on the liminal spaces where urban and domestic environments meet.

Lucy Brosnan

Brought up in a regional town in northern NSW, Lucy Brosnan reflects in her work on the rural traditions that define aspects of Australian life in the country. This painting was inspired by the annual Mungindi dog show. Evocative rather than factual, the depictions of Akubra hatted farmers in the hot, dry weather are watery memories, deliberately vague and expressionistic.

Julien Comer-Kleine

Using sound and video, this film harnesses the invisible vibrations of the land. Artist Julien Comer-Kleine amplifies the workings of nature’s precious, life-giving ecologies that many of us cannot or choose not to revere. In an era of climate change challenges that need urgent addressing, this work gives sonic agency to the natural environments on which we depend.

Joshua Copland-Nielsen

These images of post-war Australian suburban architecture are based on photographs taken by Joshua Copland-Nielsen. He transfers them to a print medium, a process that echoes their theme of being once removed both from memory and from first-hand encounter by the artist. Filled with a haunting disquiet, the images embody the essence of a fast-disappearing Australian vernacular.

Beki Davies

These drawings, prints and cyanotype photographs by Beki Davies are created on site, using as raw materials the light, wind and rain from locations in southern Tasmania. Each one is a visual documentation of the experience of being in a particular place, combining field recordings of the natural elements with the artist’s hand drawn marks, in a compelling attempt to convey a visceral as well as visual experience of place.

Winner Highly Commended Award

Nick Heynsbergh

These dark and empty suburban streets are imbued with feelings of melancholy and menace. Meditations drawn from memories of specific places, they trace the artist’s understanding and acceptance of his queer identity. Artist Nick Heynsbergh hopes that by framing this journey in the form of a dimly lit maze, that new, shared pathways can be imagined, replacing old barriers faced by minority communities.

Winner Nick Waterlow OAM Highly Commended Award

Lisa Ellen Hughes

Lisa Hughes creates playful and colourful narratives of sites around NSW waterways and beaches, depicting idiosyncratic elements of each place and people’s interaction with it. The paintings here are based on the artist’s observations in southern and central Sydney, as well as Lake Macquarie and Newcastle. In some, there is a QR code embedded within the cacophony of colour, leading us to animations that document human and marine activity.

Lynley Nargoodah

Walmajarri / Nyikina artist Linley Nargoodah renders the seven seasons of her family’s ancestral country in the Kimberley. Each colour represents a different season, rendered in vertical swathes ranging from blue which represents water, followed by the green of a healthy land filled with blossoming plant life. The artist deploys a distinctive circular motif to create a feeling of flux and fluidity.

Winner of 2021 Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize

Aaron Rees

This photograph is a play on bees as indicators of ecological disaster. Photographer Aaron Rees has manipulated the film negative to create a fictional image. The large scale depiction of Australian paper daisies is punctured, the holes revealing voids of light, that from a distance resemble insects. The work is a critique of the ways in which visual and digital media technologies have skewed our relationship to the natural world.