Waverley Art Prize

This Wednesday, July 9, is the opening of the Waverley Art Prize exhibition. It's a small local prize, but there is about $12,000 in prizes up for grabs. The Archibald Prize offers $50,000 to the winner, but I have a better chance of winning this one! Actually, it's probably easier to get into this final, but there are more finalists, so harder to win the prizes. The list of finalists is here. I entered another chopstick work from the Everything Ends series. I've been working on this series for about 8 years now, and produce something new every couple of years. I finished this one earlier in the year for the Praxis show at Kudos. The opening is from 6:00 - 8:00 at the Waverley-Woollahra Arts Centre. 138 Bondi Rd, Bondi. The exhibition continues until Sunday July 13, every day 10:00 - 4:00.


This was the first work I made in this series. It was for an undergraduate sculpture project. I don't remember what the brief was, but my inspiration was scaffolding on building sites. I equated this with the buildings themselves, and later, to the skeletons of buildings. It was about 30cm high, and i placed it under a concrete walkway. It was meant to evoke a miniature city, abandoned, partly destroyed.




I pretty much destroyed the above work in taking it down. Some of the elements were still intact. I then incorporated all the elements, and all the other bits of chopsticks into this cube below. This shot is from a finalists' exhibition for the Australian Decorative and Fine Arts Scholarship (2000?), which I didn't win. Always the bridesmaid... It's on a square of sand. It's very rough and ready, and was just slightly too large to be practical to store and handle. So I broke it up, too.
After that the works became more contained and controlled, more rigidly geometric and staying within the boundaries. I contrasted the two below, where the one on the left is a simple grid, and the other is the same anarchic, chaotic style as the one above.


It looks similar to the new one at the top, but this one has pieces going through the middle, and the joins aren't tied together. The new one was actually made from the one on the left above. After making a number of other works, I decided that I didn't like the simplicity and openness of it, so I covered the surface with a random pattern of pieces. The one below (the same work as on the right above) still maintains right angles, even though they're no longer ordered and regular like the one on the left. The new work has every join tied together with string and acrylic binder medium for extra strength. All the new works have been tied together.