Winners announced for the 2020 FUSE Glass Prize and 18th Meroogal Women’s Art Prize
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The top spot in arts columns across Australia this past week has been claimed, quite rightly, by the news that not only the coveted Archibald Prize but also the equally esteemed Wynne, Roberts Family and Packing Room Prizes have been awarded this year to Aboriginal artists. The naming of Vincent Namatjira as the first and only Aboriginal artist to receive an Archibald since the inauguration of the award almost a century ago in 1921, for a self-portrait with Australian Football League icon and ardent campaigner for racial justice Adam Goodes, has been justifiably celebrated as a crucial step toward a greater institutional recognition of Indigenous artists.
Followers of the art world could be forgiven, then, for overlooking the announcement of two other prizes of comparable prestige and financial reward for those lucky few chosen to receive them. On 17 September, the JamFactory in Adelaide named New South Wales-based artist Cobi Cockburn as the recipient of the 2020 FUSE Glass Prize for her monumental Murmuration (Light) (2019), while ACT-based Madisyn Zabel took home the David Henshall Emerging Artist Prize for her luminous assemblage of geometric forms, Illuminate III (2020). Inaugurated in 2016, the biennial prize represents the culmination of an ongoing dialogue between the JamFactory and prominent collectors and patrons Jim and Helen Carreker, offering established and emerging glass artists an opportunity to expand their practice in new directions as well as a platform to foster broader public awareness of their work, and of contemporary glass art in general.
Cockburn describes Murmuration (Light) as an exploration of ‘the silence in synchronicity and the beauty of unspoken energy’, harnessing the power of colour and abstract form to arouse a new awareness of the spaces between the geometric and divine. The work is founded on a linear grid, ‘a matrix of material and immaterial elements’ with which Cockburn sought to evoke ‘a blending of the physical and spiritual … uniform and woven together, generating a vibration of matter’. Zabel has also drawn inspiration from the transcendence of geometric form, translating the famous optical illusion of a cube that appears to exist simultaneously in two spatial planes, first devised by Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker in the early nineteenth century, into a series of three-dimensional billets of coloured glass. Like Necker’s cube, the dimensions of these billets appear to shift when seen from different points of view. Both works will take pride of place alongside those of the other 18 finalists in the 2020 FUSE Glass Prize exhibition at the Australian Design Centre, Sydney, from 9 October.
Hot on the heels of Cockburn’s and Zabel’s success in Adelaide, the recipients of yet another highly regarded prize were announced on 23 September in Nowra on the NSW coast, at the handsome estate of the Meroogal house museum. Now in its eighteenth iteration, the Meroogal Women’s Art Prize was created to amplify the voices of women in the arts, inviting submissions of work in any medium from artists across NSW, with the one condition that they must respond to the history of Meroogal and the rich collections amassed by the four generations of women who called the estate their home over the past 100 years.
From a pool of 40 finalists, selected from over 300 submissions, the panel of judges for this year’s award selected Sarah Goffman as the recipient of the grand prize of AU$7000, a Sydney Living Museums membership and a Bundanon Trust artist-in-residence scholarship, in honour of her work Blue willow, and Sassy Park as recipient of the second prize for her work Garden play set, while Julie Paterson gained a high commendation for A dozen modest fancies and a solo exhibition opportunity at Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, Nowra. Drawing inspiration, respectively, from the Willow Pattern crockery used by the women of the Thorburn and Macgregor families who once lived at Meroogal, the wooden Erzgebirge toys with which their children played and the Staffordshire porcelain figurines ornamenting their cabinets, and the memories contained within the upholstery of a ‘generous’ armchair, Goffman, Park and Paterson bring the stories of the house and its former occupants to life with evident warmth and artistic rigour.
The FUSE Glass Prize and Meroogal Women’s Art Prize are animated by different aims and draw from two very distinct facets of Australia’s arts ecology. Yet the artists chosen to receive these awards in 2020 are, notably, united by their shared gender and their focus on media long considered less worthy of serious art-historical attention than the disciplines of painting and sculpture upheld by the Archibald, Wynne, Roberts Family and Packing Room Prizes, among many others. These awards are a fitting reminder of the very real need for initiatives like the National Gallery of Australia’s ongoing #KnowMyName campaign, while the stories of the women named as recipients offer a timely counterpart to those of the women occupying the pages of our current issue, #OurNamesAmongstOthers, guest-edited by Canberra-based artist Raquel Ormella. Above all, the support and visibility that these and other prizes offer serve as further evidence of the strength and regional diversity of our nationwide artistic community.
Dr Alex Burchmore, Publication Manager
