Congratulations to Hannah Gartside, who has won the 2024 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize for her work #19, a piece in her ongoing series Bunnies in Love, Lust and Longing, 2024. The series consists of repurposed second-hand gloves made into tender anthropomorphised rabbit figures.
“I use discarded, worn materials because I believe in their inherent worth and value,” says Gartside. “These materials act as portals for storytelling, and receptive vessels for emotional expression. At times in my life I have felt devalued or discarded, and I made this work during one of those times. Have you ever heard the phrase, “the poem knows things the poet doesn’t”? Well this sculpture showed me what I needed: aloneness, rest, introspection, and quietude. Having this personal work acknowledged in this way is deeply meaningful. I have been working as an artist since I graduated from art school in 2016, and this is my first major prize win, eight years on.”
The Melbourne-based artist previously worked as a costume-maker and dresser, and now incorporates found fabrics and clothing into her sculptures and installations, which articulate sensations of longing, tenderness, care, desire and fury.
#19 has been acquired into the Woollahra Council’s permanent public collection, and Gartside receives $25,000 for the prize. Judge Liz Nowell said the winning artwork “captivated the judges with its unexpected small scale and confident rendering of form. The use of repurposed gloves imbues the sculpture with a sense of nostalgia and everyday intimacy, evoking tenderness and care. Despite its modest size, the work drew us in with its emotional depth, creating a powerful sense of connection and vulnerability.”
Also announced was the $2,000 Special Commendation Award, which was received by Girramay woman and emerging artist Erica Muriata for her work Recycled Jawun, and the $1,000 Mayor’s Choice Award, which went to Penny Howard for After School.
Further finalist artists include Chantal Fraser, Mark Eliot, Ben Young, Angus Gardner, Yoko Ozawa, Lucie Billingsley, Lynda Draper, Nathan Beard, Grace Lee, Stephen Bird, Jennifer Kemarre Martiniello OAM and Emma Bugg.
All winning sculptures, along with this year’s finalists, are now on display at the Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf.
Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize
Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf
13 September—20 October
Suggested Reading
The rhythm of creating
In a new collaborative exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary, five artists with process-lead practices contemplate material ethics through actively engaging in slowness and reuse.
Sally Gearon
The ecstatic visions of Isaac Julien
Isaac Julien’s 2022 video work Once Again…(Statues Never Die) exposes the unseen emotional registers inherent to the struggle for colonial repatriation by mapping the places where poetics and politics intersect.
Michael Sun
Scaling new heights
A new exhibition at the Australian National Capital Artists Inc (ANCA) asks 12 artists—including Dan Powers, S.A.Adair, Emma Beer and Lisa Sammut—to explore scale: from the miniature to the monumental.
Michelle Wang
The ceramics of the Central Desert
Developed in 2022 by Artback NT as part of Apmere Mparntwe—the Australian Ceramics Triennale— touring exhibition Clay on Country, showing now at New England Regional Art Museum, showcases the diversity of ceramics in the Central Desert.
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Trevor Vickers and the abstraction of light
Trevor Vickers reflects on his six-decade career in hard-edged abstraction, the value that Perth’s light offers painters, and how his latest exhibition at Art Collective WA focuses on a series of quieter works.
Steve Dow
Rob McHaffie hones in on homelife
Melbourne-born figurative artist and ceramicist Rob McHaffie takes a global view of human idiosyncrasy. His biggest exhibition to date, now showing at Bendigo Art Gallery, covers over a decade of his painting practice.