Congratulations to Tim Edwards, the winner of the Art Gallery of Western Australia’s (AGWA) 2022 Tom Malone Prize for Australian glass artists.
The winning work titled Ellipse #8, 2021, was selected from a competitive shortlist of fifteen works by Australian artists: Ruth Allen (VIC); Chick Butcher (NSW); Matthew Curtis (NSW); Tim Edwards (SA); Wendy Fairclough (SA); Laurie Fossier-Mills (WA); Brenden Scott French (SA); Marcel Hoogstad Hay (SA); Rita Kellaway (SA); Gerry King (SA); Peter Kovacsy (WA); Nick Mount (SA); Jessica Murtagh (SA); Emma Varga (NSW); and Janice Vitkovsky (SA), whose works demonstrate how Australia’s glass artists continue to invent and reinvent, challenge themselves artistically and technically, and find new frameworks to distil human experience and artistic creativity, in accessible and enlivening ways.
Tim Edwards, Ellipse #8 2021, glass, blown and wheel cut, 47 x 38 x 0.8cm. Photograph: Grant Hancock. Courtesy the artist and Art Gallery of Western Australia
This year’s judges – artist and educator Giles Bettison, AGWA Foundation Benefactor Sheryl Grimwood, AGWA Foundation Governor Elizabeth Malone, and AGWA Curator of Australian and International Art (post-1970) Robert Cook – said of the winning work:
“It’s a quiet work whose form amplifies Edwards’ command of his craft and his vision. In this regard it is so clearly a work by an artist operating at the very height of his powers. There is nothing arbitrary about it at all; the form is perfectly resolved and intentional. This extends from the vessel’s hip and shoulder shapes, to the balance of colour, to the finish, to the even wall thickness. These elements are cleverly rendered but not for cleverness sake; they do not signal material flair alone. Instead, they are the hard-won vehicle for a meditation on the flows of light, the sensation of perception and being wholly in the world, and the importance of surface in allowing viewers to form an intimate connection between our bodies and that of the object. Employing stone wheel cutting to finish the work, it is a piece that is heavily and gradually laboured yet brilliantly fresh and light. Its quietness is alive and wonderfully of this moment.”
“Considering the elements of an object, this work is primarily about drawing, the process of drawing and how objects are seen, perceived and remembered. I like that space between 3 dimensions and 2 dimensions and am interested in where the boundaries stop and start; the depth in a 2 dimensional rendering and the ‘flatness’ of a 3 dimensional object. It is a space to exaggerate, alter perspective, and offer a different possibility.”
In celebration of the Tom Malone Prize’s twentieth anniversary, the 2022 finalist works are being shown alongside winning works across the nineteen years of the Prize. The retrospective works demonstrate the beauty and versatility of glass as a medium; moving from the dark humour of Tom Moore to the calmly meditative work of Jessica Loughlin, the playful spirit of Nick Mount, and the precarious theatre of Gabriella Bisetto. On show at AGWA from 3 June to 31 July 2022
