Hornsby Art Prize 2024 Winners
| Prize | Artist | Artwork | Artist Statement |
|---|---|---|---|
| WINNER Hornsby Art Prize, $10,000 | Dave Snook |  Labour Plein Air, oil on board | A blistering sun is a classic iconography of Australia but a very real experience of the outdoor worker. This painting was created with the intention to highlight the effects of the sun on human skin, like that of the sitter of this portrait, who works as an horticulturalist collecting, processing and selling native Australian seeds. |
| Hornsby Shire Local Artist Award, $5,000 | David Collins |  Barrier Range, oil on canvas |
During a recent Artist's Residency in Broken Hill, I was struck by the juxtaposition of the ancient, timeless land and the temporary, fragile human structures that sit on it.
Steel mining equipment, railways, dwellings, and sheds simultaneously impose themselves on the landscape and are returning to it through rust and decay. The solid intensely coloured hills of the Barrier Ranges form the backdrop to impermanent, crumbling structures. Reminders of our transience. |
| Sculpture Award $1,500 | Dave Doyle |  Eroded, cast bronze | ‘Eroded’ serves as a poignant reflection on the enduring struggle to preserve our cultural identity amidst external pressures to assimilate and forget our roots. It speaks to the relentless forces that seek to erode our connection to our past, our identity, and our ancestral lands. Through metaphorical erosion, our souls, memories, and customs bear the scars of this ongoing battle, wearing away at our knowledge, language, ceremony, and stories. Yet, like a weathered shield, we remain resilient. Despite the erosion, our spirit endures, steadfast and unyielding, a testament to the strength of our cultural heritage. |
| Painting Award $1,500 | Peter Sharp |  Pebble, oil and acrylic on linen board | The work I make may appear abstract, but it all starts with drawings made in the landscape and then the forms are filtered through various media to disrupt and force a visual transformation and this in turn creates questions about how we see ourselves in nature. |
| Digital Stills/ Digital Photography Award $1,500 | Orlando Luminere |  Wasted View: Brooklyn #0088, inkjet printed fine art print |
In ‘Brooklyn #0088’ from my photographic ‘Wasted Views’ series, I use a camera obscura fashioned from a discarded steel trash can to explore and question our relationship with consumption, and implicitly, with waste.
With this hand-built camera, equipped with digital capabilities, I seek beautiful landscapes to be captured and reflected inside a trash bin, turning what we normally see as rubbish into a photographically unpredictable and difficult to control vessel for holding beauty. This camera, I hope, challenges our tendency to relate to the environment through disposable smartphones, with experience filtered and validated through often uncontrolled and unpredictable social media. By transforming waste into a tool for art, I hope to inspire a conversation to rethink how we perceive value and beauty and validate this for ourselves and our society in our everyday lives. |
| Printmaking Award $1,500 | Carolyn Craig |  Becoming Penguin, polymer etching from performance | My work uses parody and performance to unravel the affectual residue of embodied relations and systems of power. How can a subject orient itself in a world where perspectives of meaning are dissolving into a groundless moment? I kept feeling drawn to images of penguins huddling together against violent climatic conditions and felt myself becoming penguin in a residue moment of loss and gain. |
| Drawing Award $1,500 | Lucy O’Doherty |  80s kitchen with CD rack, carrot magnet and unfinished peas, soft pastel on paper | This soft pastel drawing is a reconstruction of my childhood kitchen using my memories and old family photos as references. This work is partly a nostalgic tribute to the 80s/90s technology I grew up with in both its subject matter and the drawing process as to reconstruct the room I had to search through physical copies of images from outdated disposable cameras to piece together glimpses of what the room looked like. I enjoyed re-entering a space that was a cornerstone of my youth through the process of drawing and capturing the mini still life’s of kitchen paraphernalia. |
| People’s Choice Award | Paul Littrich |  Whipbird Duet, ink on paper |
Living on the edge of bushland in Hornsby, I'm deeply inspired by the intricate beauty and rich biodiversity of our local area. This illustration of a male and female pair of Eastern whipbirds is a tribute to this remarkable species, renowned for the unique call-and-response 'duet' of the male's 'whip-crack'
exclamation, and the female's ascending, staccato retort.
Drawing this illustration was an intimate process, often created to the accompaniment of the whipbirds' resonating call, punctuating the stillness of the bushland behind my home. In this piece, I aimed to capture with clarity, the essence of this elusive bird, and the close bond of the pair. Because, without the pair, this iconic bushland melody, falls silent. Through this artwork, I invite you to appreciate the whipbird's delicate beauty and to consider the broader narrative of conservation, custodianship, and respect for the natural heritage of Hornsby Shire. |
| Local Hornsby Shire Artist, Highly Commended | Simon Begg | High figure camphor vessel | |
| Sculpture Highly Commended | Nicholas Wishart | 16 Opals | |
| Painting Highly Commended | Donovan Christie | Below the line | |
| Digital Stills/Digital Photography Highly Commended | Mary Benvenuto | Morning Thoughts | |
| Printmaking Highly Commended | Guinevere Isla | It still has a use | |
| Drawing Highly Commended | Isobel Rayson | Fall into place |