The National Art School Fellowship acknowledges the achievements of eminent visual artists, arts administrators, writers, advocates and academics who have made outstanding contributions to the visual arts community in Australia.
This year’s recipients – Fiona Foley, Peter Powditch AM, and Tim Storrier AM – were honoured at a celebratory dinner on Thursday 18 May 2017, held at the National Art School (NAS) in the gallery space that was once the studio of celebrated Australian sculptor and NAS teacher, Rayner Hoff.
2017 national Art School Fellowships recipients Peter Powditch AM, Fiona Foley and Tim Storrier AM
Powditch’s award was presented after a citation from his childhood friend and contemporary artist, Ron Robertson-Swann OAM, the National Art School’s Head of Sculpture. Foley’s citation was presented by curator and writer Djon Mundine, and Storrier’s by Catharine Lumby, who wrote a book of the artist’s work in 2000.
NAS Director Steven Alderton commends the three Fellows; “In recognising these three prominent alumni, we are recognising their immense contributions to Australian art. Their work and their careers are inspirations to our students.”
Artist, writer and curator Fiona Foley is a Badtjala woman from Hervey Bay and Fraser Island in southeast Queensland. She completed a Certificate in Arts at the National Art School in 1983. Her practice comprises of a range of media, including digital video, photography, sculpture, painting and installation. A co-founder of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative in 1987, her work examines and dismantles historical and cultural stereotypes, and explores a broad range of themes that relate to politics, culture, ownership, language and identity. Her works have revealed little known and un-acknowledged atrocities or underlying racist attitudes throughout Australia’s recent histories regarding Aboriginal and Chinese and have brought to public consciousness the systemic violence of a colonial past toward Aboriginal nations, particularly in Queensland.
“I have very fond memories of two lecturers who were inspirational teachers, who taught me about life in the arts; Geoffrey De Groen and Bruce McCalmont. Bruce taught me to be true to sculptural form and not to ‘put the icing on the cake’. In other words, not to bring the seeds in from the date palms surrounding the buildings and sprinkle them on top. He encouraged me to look and think at a deeper level. The early eighties in Sydney were my formative years. The atmosphere with other students was warm and many of us forged life-long friendships.” – Fiona Foley, 2017
Peter Powditch AM is a painter, printmaker and sculptor who studied at the National Art School from 1960-1963. He originally started in the commercial art department, but in his second year switched to sculpture with Lyndon Dadswell, where he studied for three years. He also studied at a small school in the Rocks under Robert Klippel, John Passmore and John Olsen. He had his first exhibition in 1966 at Gallery A, before moving to Rudy Komon’s stable and then Ray Hughes Gallery. His work developed a unique style of flattening the picture plane, focusing on line and drawing out depth, particularly through the use of female figures. Powditch returned to NAS to teach from 1968-1973. He won the Sulman Prize in 1972, and continues to stage regular exhibitions nationally and internationally today, including a recent retrospective earlier in 2017 at S.H. Ervin Gallery, ADD
“Lyndon Dadswell taught me to see. John Olsen taught me what to see.” – Peter Powditch, 2017
Tim Storrier AM studied at NAS from 1967-1969 and is a celebrated symbolic landscape painter. His ‘burning rope’ paintings are some of the best known in contemporary Australian art, and his totemic images of saddles, knives, bottles and cooking implements link Australia’s exploration history with contemporary life. Storrier has exhibited widely, both in Australia, where major survey exhibitions of his work have been held in Australian and abroad. Storrier has won the Sulman Prize twice, in 1968 and 1984, and the Archibald Prize in 2012.
“It was raining and I was playing the Beatles ‘Help’ on the stereogram the morning before I went to the East Sydney Technical College to be tested for admittance in 1967. 50 years later I reflect that the gift of critically seeing the visual world and being able to translate it was given to me by the men and women at this grand old institution.” – Tim Storrier, 2017
