Visual Arts

This week’s banner is one of Thea Anamara Perkins’s works from the the La Prairie Art Award.

Arrernte and Kalkadoon artist and Old Girl Thea Anamara Perkins (Class of 2009) was announced last week as the winner of the $80,000 La Prairie Art Award, an annual prize in association with the Art Gallery of NSW that champions work by Australian female artists. Thea, whose family often are the subject for her work, won for a suite of four paintings that depict three generations of her relatives in medium scale images.

Thea’s other recent works include a large scale mural at Carriageworks that was part of the Sydney Festival over the Summer. In this ambitious and striking work, Thea painted her Great Grandmother, Hetty, against the backdrop of her Country near Arltunga, around Mparntwe/Alice Springs where she lived and worked. The mural questions who is mythologised in the foundation narratives of this Country, using the language of the Australian gothic.

You can read more about the mural here.

“It’s about taking charge of representation – I find that painting is a very simple and direct way of communicating things that I want to say.” – Thea Anamara Perkins

Below are the la Prairie winning works

© Thea Anamara Perkins, image © Art Gallery of New South Wales

Each of the images is an appropriation of photographic snapshots of intimate moments from the past, including a family birthday party and Charles Perkins’ graduation in 1966 from Sydney University holding his daughter, Hetti, Thea’s Mother.

“I was trying to present a very nuanced view of these emotions,” says Perkins. “They are unified by a sense of safety and connection but as First Nations people there is always a melancholy we have to deal with.”

Heidi Jackson
Head of Visual Arts