Macquarie Group Collection
The exceptional quality of the finalists’ work reflects the significant depth of talent to be found among Australia’s next generation of promising artists. Congratulations to the 2022 finalists:
Please note:
Billy is a contemporary Indigenous Australian artist of Darug descent, the traditional Aboriginal people of Greater Western Sydney. His practice unpacks and challenges presumptions of Australian Identity, in this case reimagining the March Past that is held during surf lifesaving carnivals and which in many ways reflects a colonialist attitude of ownership over the beach. Bain’s lifesavers are all of First Nations descent and are reclaiming the often contested spaces of Australia’s beaches.
ceramic terracotta with glaze and underglaze
74 x 35 x 20 cm
$A4,000
ceramic terracotta with glaze and underglaze
69 x 35 x 23 cm
$A3,600
ceramic terracotta with glaze and underglaze
62 x 33 x 22 cm
$A3,300
ceramic terracotta with glaze and underglaze
73 x 35 x 21 cm
$A4,000
ceramic terracotta with glaze and underglaze
64 x 35 x 20 cm
$A3,300
Margaret is a Luritja artist who has been working with Bindi Mwerre Anthurre Artists in Papunya since 2020. Her innovative digital prints are about her relationship to Country, depicting creatures and people in landscapes of desert and rivers. They provide quirky insights into aspects of home life and of the drive from Papunya to Mparntwe (Alice Springs). Margaret’s great storytelling comes to light through her colourful evocation of everything in her life, from cheeky animals to her love of country music.
digital painting print on paper
42 x 59 cm
$A600
digital painting print on paper
40 x 40 cm
$A400
digital painting print on paper
20 x 20 cm
$A200
digital painting print on paper
46 x 31 cm
$A400
By juxtaposing a hastily-shot photograph with the slow and laborious process of naturally-dyeing and weaving silk, this work is a metaphor for our increasingly detached interactions with nature. Travelling along the Stuart Highway between Mparntwe (Alice Springs) and Uluru at 130kph, the image celebrates endless red dirt and big blue skies, a desert lush with green after unseasonal rain in early 2022. According to the artist, “In our rush to memorialise landscape in digital form, we pixelate it, share it and wait for the likes to ping in, but miss the feel and essence of the place.”
handwoven mulberry silk, naturally dyed with plants and insects
65 x 96 x 3 cm
$A2,000
Sophie uses photographic juxtaposition to consider the impacts of farming and technology on the natural world. The Hairy Panic photographs are of sculptures placed in drought-stricken farmlands near Lake George, Gundungurra people’s land. The pink tumbleweeds are made of industrial fencing steel and human hair. The name comes from media coverage of the 2016 invasion of Wangaratta by ‘Pancium effuse’, a native species of tumbleweed toxic to livestock. The Roadster Crash series references Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster that was launched into space and is currently in orbit around the Sun. Staged at sunrise and sunset, it was filmed and photographed in Yuin Country on the south coast.
Rag Photographique, ed 2/3
83 x 116 cm
$A3,500
Rag Photographique, ed 2/3
116 x 83 cm
$A3,500
Rag Photographique, ed 2/3
83 x 116 cm
$A3,500
Rag Photographique, ed 2/3
83 x 116 cm
$A3,500
Rag Photographique, ed 2/3
83 x 116 cm
$A3,500
Despite the well-documented impacts of climate change on our natural environments, in those landscapes we pass through regularly, change is not always immediately evident. Harry’s artwork “questions how our constructed memory of the landscape is often very different to glanced reality, yet when we look closer we can see the scars of our actions”. The combination of collaged photographs and text creates a fictional scenery born out of the artist’s memory and dreams. In these works, the landscape of his childhood merges with the landscape of our present, creating an image that is completely invented and yet familiar.
photo collage
50 x 120 cm
$A650
photo collage
80 x 50 cm
$A800
photo collage
60 x 80 cm
$A750
photo collage
100 x 100 cm
$A1,200
Influenced by Raymond Carver’s short story ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’, Xanthe’s painting explores a psychological entanglement between the everyday and the uncanny, and the surreal aspects of human connection which we all experienced coming together again in the recent post-lockdown period. The painting is imbued with intangible meaning and a quiet stillness, a time, in the artist’s own words “when the gin is empty and the conservation is done, when no one moves, or speaks, not even when night arrives.”
gouache, ink and watercolour on paper
88 x 120 cm
$A2,000
This work describes the tension between the way humans inhabit and develop the environment, and our impact on the plants and animals with which we co-exist. It comprises over sixty prints of plants and animals. All are from Western Australia’s Peel region, originally home to the Bindjareb Noongar people, and all are classified as vulnerable, endangered or highly endangered. Lyn’s images are printed onto porcelain houses, installed on a ground that references how the landscape has been modified and natural habitats destroyed over time. The use of a fragile material such as porcelain to create the houses reminds us that it is not just the plants and animals that are endangered.
220 porcelain houses, each 5x7x3cm, plinth 190 x 120cm
each bundle of 10 houses $A320
Having joined Hermannsburg Potters just this year, Abel is already bringing his own unique style to a craft that has defined the small NT group of Western Arranta artists for over thirty years. Abel’s great, great grandfather was a landscape painter who worked with well-known First Nations artist Albert Namatjira, and his grandfather in turn learnt to paint from these two men. The tree featured on the pot grows in the Finke River in Hermannsburg: Abel has observed since it was small, surviving a series of floods to grow into a big tree.
terracotta clay and ceramic underglaze
50 x 24 x 24 cm
$A3,300
Tiwi artist Simplicia was born on Bathurst Island but since has lived her adult life on Melville Island, where she joined Munupi Arts & Crafts three years ago. Her paintings are rendered in ‘Jilamara’ (Tiwi design) and depict the body painting used in traditional ceremonies. Much of her work refers to ‘Mundungkala’ or ‘long-time / old people’, conveying traditional stories. This one is about an elderly woman who went in search of water and created the Tiwi islands.
natural ochres on canvas
180 x 120 cm
$A7,500
This handcrafted work was inspired by the artist’s firsthand observations of environmental disasters. After the 2017 catastrophic bushfires on Bundjalung Country in northern NSW, Jodi attached sheets of paper to burnt trees, having soaked them in a local tea tree lake. They were exposed to the elements for several weeks. Five years later, she has returned to the paper, flattening and leaving it in the rains which resulted in the devastating 2022 floods. Jodi then cut and folded the paper to make this work, the evolving nature of the material invoking flux and the need for sustainable approaches in the face of climate change.
charcoal, tannins, paper mounted on board
170 x 50 x 5 cm
$A7,500
