Congratulations to Sam Bloor for winning the 2016 Fremantle Arts Centre (FAC) Print Award. The West Australian artist has won the prestigious $16,000 prize for his piece In Unison.
Bloor created his more than a meter-long ‘found’ print by carefully chiselling a layered strip of paint from a wall covered in graffiti. Bloor chose a location that has been used by street artists for years and his work reads like a palimpsest of local history.
The 2016 FAC Print Award was judged by artist and independent curator Consuelo Cavaniglia; Dr Darren Jorgensen, discipline chair, Art History and senior lecturer, School of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts at the University of Western Australia; and Hannah Mathews, senior curator, Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA).
In a joint statement the judges said, “While the concept of printmaking came about through the invention of the printing press in Europe, leaving one’s mark has long been a means by which life records its passage through the material world. Through In Unison we can begin to rethink the history of printmaking in Australia. The first prints may well have been animal tracks, impressions of mega fauna left before the arrival of the First Australians who printed their handprints on rock walls.”
Second prize went to a collaborative work by Victorian artists Elvis Richardson and Virginia Fraser. They won $6,000 for their print, FEMMO™ Issue 4, 5 & 6, which depicts a triptych of fictional feminist magazine covers.
“The format of this work (bold words, eye grabbing colour, the template of the magazine cover) speaks not only to the history of print publishing but to the structures of power that include and exclude,” the judges said. “The work’s language is distinctly feminist and speaks to an audience of female artists, singling out those who are a statistical majority and yet remain a visible minority in the industry.”
Works by all of the finalists are on show in the FAC Print Award exhibition.
FAC Print Award
Fremantle Arts Centre
23 September –12 November
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