Grace Cossington Smith biennial art award 2021 Winners Exhibition
Grace Cossington Smith biennial art award Winners Exhibition
28 January to 25 February 2023
The winners’ exhibition provides greater depth and understanding of the broader practice of Nadia Hernández, Alice Wormald and David Collins.
The finalists and award winners were selected by guest judges: Katrina Cashman, Gallery Manager and Senior Curator at the National Art School; and Oliver Watts, Senior Curator of Artbank, Sydney and artist.
Winner of GCS art award 2021 (acquisitive)
Nadia Hernández Represented by Station
Judges’ comments: Dulce de lechoza verde (procedimiento)[Green papaya sweet (procedure)], is a beautiful textile work that harks back to the artist’s heritage, considering ideas of diaspora and food connecting culture and family. It is full of life, tenderness and is a very loving work that represents the connections we all need now.
About Nadia Hernández Nadia Hernández was born in Mérida, Venezuela, and is currently based between Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. Her visual arts practice is informed specifically by the current political climate of her home country and her diasporic experience as a Venezuelan woman living abroad. Articulated through textiles, paper constructions, painting, music, installations, sculptures and murals, her identity allows her, or perhaps encourages her, to create work that negotiates complex political narratives through the personal, the institutional and their intersections.
Hernández holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Queensland University of Technology, was a finalist in the inaugural Ellen José Art Awards (2022) and has been a Create NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellow (2020). She was commissioned to develop an immersive educational program and exhibition as Shepparton Art Museum’s EduLAB artist (2020) and was a recipient of the Bundanon Trust Artist in Residence (2019). Hernández was the winner of the 2019 Churchie National Emerging Art Prize, one of Australia’s leading prizes for emerging artists. Her work has featured in a number of group and solo exhibitions, including the Macfarlane Commissions exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in 2022.
Winner Local Artist Award 2021
David Collins Represented by Defiance Gallery
Judges’ comments: Hot Burn is an evocative, well observed landscape capturing a strong connection to place. Collins poetically responds to the land through colour, and beautiful glazes provide a sense of depth, heat and refracted light. Also revealed are suggestions of the devasting fires we so recently experienced.
About David Collins Since completing his art education at Hornsby TAFE and The Canberra School of Art in the late ’70s and early ’80s, David Collins has travelled extensively within Australia and overseas to pursue his career as a landscape painter.
In 1987, he moved to Dangar Island and since that time the Hawkesbury River environment has been a major influence on his work. Collins has held 19 solo exhibitions of paintings and drawings and participated in numerous group exhibitions. He has worked in The Kimberley, The Pilbara, Central Australia and France, with residencies in China, Queensland, New Zealand and, most recently, The Monaro and Hunter Regions of NSW. Collins has been a finalist in many art awards, including The Calleen Art Award, The Muswellbrook Art Prize, The Paddington Art Prize, The Salon des Refusés and The Wynne Prize, where he received a high commendation in 2013.
“My work is about relationships. Observations and feelings towards the landscape around me and the myriad, connections between colours, marks, tones, etc, that slowly evolve on the canvas.”– David Collins
Winner Emerging Artist Award 2021
Alice Wormald Represented by Gallery 9
Judges’ comments: Turning in Circles is a contemporary painting that revels in artifice, with the artist playing with, and remaking, found images. It is a work full of contrasts – inside/outside, natural/artificial and a variety of very interesting viewpoints.
About Alice Wormald
Alice Wormald creates paintings depicting strange, constructed spaces where surface and depth, representation and abstraction, and naturalism and artifice converge. The works often emerge through the process of image collection and collage. She exercises a controlled sense of representation, grounded in concerns around the act of painting and the physicality of paint itself, while reflecting a hallucinatory experience of space and nature.
Wormald has held numerous solo exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney and has exhibited in art fairs, ARIs and public galleries since graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2011. She has been a finalist in many prizes including: Geelong Contemporary Art Prize, John Leslie Prize, Sunshine Coast Art Prize, Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize and Albany Art Prize. Her work is held in numerous collections including Artbank, Macquarie Group Collection, Australian Catholic University, Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Darebin City Council, Gippsland Art Gallery, Joyce Nissan Collection, Fiona Myer Collection and private collections.
“I make paintings which develop alongside a process of image collection and collage. Using pictures from books, magazines and my own photographs, the works are conversations with and within the painted surface. They embody the idea of painting as a puzzle, each piece interacting by an unseen logic and overlapping and intersecting to create its own distinct rhythm.”– Alice Wormald
| Related downloads | |
| GCS art award Winners Exhibition Media Release | Download PDF |
| GCS art award Winners Exhibition Catalogue | Download PDF |
| GCS art award Winners Exhibition Learning Resource | Download PDF |
Images courtesy and © the artists
Installation photography Richard Glover