Claire Lambe has won the Darebin Art Prize 2017 for her photographic work, She never speaks about herself, she could be anything.
Awarded every two years, the Darebin Art Prize recognises outstanding Australian contemporary visual art, including painting, photography, video, sculpture, and craft.
Lambe’s winning photograph shows a wooden office-like chair in the midst of a photo-shoot, and the title of the work appears as a subtitle at the bottom of the image.
Alongside the honour of winning, Lambe will receive a $10,000 prize and her photograph will be acquired by the Darebin City Council art collection.
Lambe was awarded the prize by a judging panel that included Professor of Art and Performance at Deakin University, David Cross; artist Lou Hubbard; and Curator of Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, Claire Watson.
Cross said of Lambe’s photograph, “The winning work demonstrates an extraordinary acuity, a stunning economy of image, text, materiality and concept. It evokes a quiet but sustained resonance and captures an elision of visual complexity and haptic experience.”
When speaking of the work’s emotive affect on audiences, Cross noted the immediate and visceral impact of Lambe’s photograph. “In an exhibition of work that is so affective and complex, it somehow suspends and holds the participant in a thrall, it keeps us delicately within its unique activation of space and experience of time,” he said.
All of artists in the exhibition are still in the running for the $1,000 People’s Choice Award.
Darebin Art Prize 2017
Bundoora Homestead Art Centre
28 October – 4 March 2018