66th Blake Prize shortlisting

My 2018 work, Released, has been shortlisted for the 66th Blake Prize, and is to be exhibited at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre (CPAC) in early 2021, opening on 13 February. I’m thrilled for a couple of reasons. Firstly because I’m one of only 89 artists selected from over 1200 submissions. Amazing.

Secondly, because the work means a lot to me: it was created for the 2018 University of Canberra staff show, The Uncertainty Principle (clicking on that takes you to the exhibition catalogue). These annual exhibitions offer an opportunity for Faculty of Art & Design staff to explore their research in a material, creative way. They may only make one creative work a year — for this show — or they may have a thriving creative practice, or even have a thriving creative practice in a different field, but this is a chance to firmly connect ideas and outputs.

I always try to make new work for the exhibitions, because my art practice IS my research, and this opportunity allows me to be a bit tangential to my usual outputs. I love responding to a theme, and this was right up my alley, as I feel uncertainty about many things that other people treat as norms. Here’s what we were presented with in terms of the theme:

This exhibition … is inspired by Heisenberg’s famous phrase that points to the fuzziness in the natural world, and the impossibility of knowing in any certain way what things are, and how they operate. While we respect the specialised understanding of this concept, grounded as it is in physics, we read it as a metaphor for art practice. Artists are, we suggest, always feeling their way into new works, often not certain about what they are doing or what it means. Nonetheless, we keep going, hoping to keep finding new ways to make, see and understand – however uncertain or how partial that seeing and understanding might be. (catalogue, p.3)

So I made Released and its accompanying book, because I’d been trying to work out what to do with this particular item for a long time, and this theme allowed me to research ways into and through my feelings, not only about the event in question, but about our human relationship to moments and objects. If we can’t make sense of something, we make up answers and turn to objects and rituals. Sometimes there is just no sense and no answer. But there are always objects and rituals.

Wish me luck in the judging.