By Peter Maddern
The Waterhouse Natural History Prize endeavours to provide artists of all genres the chance to have their say about nature, recording it purely and / or observing it under the mixed influences of man. Previously proclaimed loudly as Australia’s richest prize in that subject, this year’s program and on-line information shy away from such claims in favour of copious coverage about the sponsors. It seems at times ironic that as artists strive to highlight man’s damage to the environment, directly and through climate change, a petroleum company is touted as the prize’s main sponsor.
Anyway, now in its eleventh year, the 2013 Waterhouse does not reach the heights of the past few years, with the finalists’ work in all the visual arts bar photography now on display at the SA Museum. Strangely when it comes to quality, there can be no doubt that it is the ‘sculpture and objects’ category that dominates this year’s entries; there seems to be something more connecting about the message being conveyed around the permanence and fragility of nature in three dimensional objects than in say painting and drawing.
The selection of this year’s winner I doubt will attract much controversy for it is the stand out work of the exhibition by some distance. Judith Brown’s Flight of Fancy is a blouse made of bulbs, leaves and paper and I see no hope in attempting to describe it better than the words of the judges who noted its ‘singular originality and rare beauty …. an object of extraordinary delicacy and technical accomplishment.’ Only careful in situ examination can fully translate those words to a reader with the detail both front and back so intricate and diligently thought through. Why it is stuck in the middle of one of the tighter through areas of the exhibition is anyone’s guess for it deserves more stand alone status.
Other object delights are Shannon Garson’s thrown porcelain Dry Season Bowl, Holly Grace’s sturdy yet vulnerable blown glass Eucalyptus Paciflora – Charlottes Pass, Nic Mount’s Fruit salad and Roger Buddle’s Toadstools – with the both the last two in glass and wood.
Of the paintings, the judges and I are again in agreement that Claudine Marzik’s Belt Cairns West a worthy winner. Drawing on an Australian landscape style that dates from Roberts through to Williams and Olsen, Marzik’s depiction of this northern Queensland area is delicate, balanced yet arresting, with her working of the surface of the canvas delivering a real sense of the weathered land. Stephanie Sheppard’s Monaro Tree lines is also a work worth viewing for it is one that in five panels focuses on various outcrops of trees that pop up on the flat south central landscape of New South Wales, almost oddities given the often bland and dry fields around them.
Fortunately, the now somewhat well-worn climate change genre did not much attract the judges’ attention but one of interest in the Youth section is Nadia Parkinson’s Yellow Winged Locust that she presents in watercolours as if a pinned butterfly exhibit elsewhere in the museum with one side of its delicate features damaged by the effects of pesticides and the like, posing the question of whether it is really a pest.
Always worth the visit, the Waterhouse continues til 8th September.
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