More than sixty years since it was founded, the Blake Prize is still one of the most respected, diverse and open-ended art prizes in Australia today, encouraging conversation about spirituality and religion through art.
This year’s Prize received 594 entries with 80 finalists were chosen including leading contemporary practitioners to emerging and self-taught artists. Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre (CPAC) is the new permanent home for the Blake Art Prize and will complement the rich community, cultural diversity and the vibrant arts scene in Western Sydney. CPAC Director, Kiersten Fishburn has announced Yardena Kurulkar from Mumbai, India as the winner of the 64th Blake Art Prize, receiving receives $35,000 for her work, Kenosis.
Yardena says of her work: I create moments of confrontations between life and death. My works are acts of surrender to the inevitability of an end and are presented as part of a cycle of continuous regeneration, whereby discovering my own mortality and contemplating on our collective fear of death. In ‘Kenosis, 2015, I use a terracotta replica (made with the help of 3D printing) of my own heart. The heart is the first organ to develop in a foetus. I use water to portray the passage of time and also as an agent of purging. I let the viewer see what remains of this union – a heart-shaped something, a mere lump of clay. Pausing to reflect on the shape shifting ability of human nature and probably time itself I shun the need to regenerate, rather focusing on the reconstruction that human anatomy endures. This work is an attempt to capture the erosion, resurrection and elusiveness of human life.
CPAC Director Kiersten Fishburn said: “There is something primal and rich about the use terracotta and the form of the heart – for me the work has many allusions from the Venus of Willendorf and her fecund life giving form, to our common and universal understanding that eventually for all of us our corporeal form decays and ends. The work is a moment of both life and death. This year’s Blake Prize is one of the best in its history – we have so much diversity from traditional art techniques to video works.”
Damien Shen is the winner of the Emerging Artist Award, which is $6000 for the acquisitive prize for his work On the fabric of the Ngarrindjeri body and Robert Hague for his work This Messenger has won the inaugural Blake Residency program – a one-month residency at CPAC and a solo exhibition which will be unveiled at the 2018 Blake exhibition program.
Judges for the 64th Blake Art Prize were Reverend Tim Costello, CEO of World Vision Australia, artist Leanne Tobin and Professor Amanda Lawson, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Wollongong.
The Blake Prize exhibition runs until 24 April 2016 at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre. Following the exhibition at CPAC The Blake Prize will then tour to a number of galleries around Australia.
Yardena Kurulkar, Kenosis, 2015
