Fremantle artist Susan Flavell has won the 2014 Bankwest Art Prize People’s Choice Award for her striking sculpture The shimmer, taking home a prize of $5,000 to fund art materials.
Flavell describes her striking two-metre tall papier mache sculpture as the Chimera – “an unreal creature of the imagination, implausible in its shape and identity.”
“It has become a byword for vain or idle fancies, for the impossible, for perverse imagination, for the temptation of imaginative exhalation. A large area of my practice revolves around the everyday and unheroic materials of cardboard and papier mache. The cardboard works are like large three-dimensional drawings, you can see the lines of their construction, including the ‘mistakes’ and the rubbing outs,” says Flavell.
The artwork received the most public votes of the seventeen Bankwest Art Prize finalists. Bankwest Art Curator Sandra Murray said she was impressed with Susan’s work and believed the artist would take confidence from the award.
The Bankwest Art Prize was established in 2001 and is considered the State’s most prestigious prize awarded exclusively to Western Australian artists. This is the first time the Bankwest Art Prize called for three-dimensional works which inspired entries from many local artists, placing contemporary Western Australian sculpture in the spotlight.
The works by the 2014 finalists remain on public display at the Bankwest Art Gallery at Bankwest Place in Perth until 6 March.
Bankwest Art Gallery – Bankwest Place
Until 6 March, 2015
Perth
Susan Flavell, The shimmer, 2014, cardboard, papier mache, hot glue, clag, glass, marble dust, glitter, gold leaf, 200 x 120 x 300cm
Represented by Turner Galleries
Photo: courtesy of the artist