Tara Murray
A dream about fire was the inspiration for the winning piece of the 2021 Geelong acquisitive print award competition.
Canberra-based artist Dianne Fogwell took out the award and the $10,000 prize with her piece Latency, ahead of 33 other pieces selected from around Australia.
This nationally acclaimed acquisitive prize exhibition features entries from around Australia by established and emerging printmakers representing the diversity of current practice through both traditional printmaking techniques as well as contemporary processes.
This year’s exhibition includes thought-provoking responses to the built environment, the natural world, history and culture, geopolitics and world events, everyday objects, portraits, language and storytelling, and explorations of colour and form through abstraction.
Ms Fogwell in her artist statement said that she started dreaming of fire after her mother’s death some years ago.
Judges said her five-panel unique-state colour linocut is extraordinary for its technical brilliance and conceptual richness.
“Last summer, watching the smoke rolling in quiet and dense over Canberra brought these dreams and subsequent investigations into a new realm of contemplation,” Fogwell said.
“Latency is about fragile veils of landscape waiting for what is to come.
“The work is printed on both sides to encourage a feeling of both looking in and looking out through a curtain, but both with a sense of disquiet, of unknowing, but also with a knowing that something this way comes that we must next endure.
“There is a great collective sadness in losing the idea of the Australian bush as ‘eternal’ or ‘invincible’, but there is always hope: for with our considered help there can be regeneration of both place and spirit.”
