Now in its twenty-fourth year, the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize continues to highlight the dynamic and diverse creativity that defines contemporary sculpture. The selected works reflect the innovation and depth of the medium, spanning a variety of materials, forms, and themes.
This year’s fifty-five finalists explore the transformative potential of materials, including ceramic, matchboxes, paper pulp, neon, photographic paper, hand-blown glass and resin poured and frozen in time. Their works explore themes such as joy, grief, identity, transformation, knowledge and memory.
Gallery Director, Sep Pourbozorgi, said: “These works are engaging in ways both intimate and expansive. They highlight how choices of scale and material shape our experiences.”
Sassy Park, Familiars. Image supplied.
Highlights include:
Sassy Park’s Familiars, comprising thirteen small ceramic sculptures, each uniquely shaped and painted. Inspired by ancient household deities, these intimate figures – ranging from portrait heads to everyday scenes – serve as a personal sculptural diary. The work reflects on themes of protection, domestic life, vulnerability, and the human desire to find meaning in objects around us.
Josina Pumani’s Maralinga. Josina is a Pitjantjatjara woman from Mimili, South Australia, whose ceramics tell the Maralinga story – the devastating legacy of British nuclear tests in the 1950s that displaced and harmed the Anangu people. Her hand-built pots use red to represent fires and grey for smoke, with textured surfaces evoking how the fallout travelled across APY Lands.
Josina Pumani, Maralinga. Image supplied.
Ruth Ju-shih Li’s Florilège IX is a wax sculpture with a single cotton wick, which expands Li’s clay practice into new materials, ritual, and performance. Organic yet abstract, it releases sandalwood fragrance reminiscent of her grandmother’s home in Taipei. Its monochromatic floral forms blend personal memory with reflections on life’s transient nature.
Belem Lett’s Life Cycle is a looping, multicoloured sculpture made from small painted timber sections. Its twisting lines create shifting shapes, colours, and openings that change as you move around it. Playful yet reflective, the work traces the stages of life, from growth to return, echoing the cyclical nature of our existence.
Amy Wong’s BUTT (2025) is a 3D-printed sculpture of Wong’s own buttocks, styled like a classical Greco-Roman bust. Created in response to growing up with body dysmorphia and a conservative Vietnamese mother who urged her to hide her figure, the work reclaims confidence, celebrates body positivity, and playfully challenges cultural and familial expectations.
Amy Wong, BUTT (2025). Image supplied.
The 2025 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize finalists are:
Alice Lang, Alicia Cox, Amanda Page, Amy Wong, Andrew Christie, Annabel Lahz, Anne-Marie May, Belem Lett, Bianca Hester, Brad Gunn, Bronwyn Sargeson and Floria Tosca, Carol Crawford, Christian Bonett, Christopher Jewitt, Christopher Langton, Daniel Agdag, Darcey Bella Arnold, Donna Marcus, Emma-Kate Hart, Jacqueline Bradley, Jake Clark , Jane Hosking, Jennifer Oh, Jessica Murtagh, Josephine Bridge, Joshua Copland-Nielsen, Joshua Rowell, Josina Pumani, Kat Shapiro Wood, Katherine Castillo Alferez, Kirsten Coelho, Lucie Billingsley, Lynda Draper, Martin John Oldfield, MeiMei Hodgkinson, Mel Booth, Michael Cusack, Michelle Ussher, Morgan Stokes, Nadine Schmoll, Nasim Nasr, Nuha Saad, Paul Davies, Paul McInnes, Robert Schwartz, Ruth Ju-shih Li, Sassy Park, Simon Chalmers, Stephen Bird, Stephen Ralph, Tahlia Undarlegt, Tai Snaith, Tanya Reinli, Thomas Mason, and Virginia Leonard.
The 2025 finalists’ works will be on display at Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf, Double Bay NSW 2028, from 26 September to 16 November 2025, with the winners announced at the official opening on Thursday 25 September. The total prize pool of $29,000 includes the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize ($25,000), Special Commendation Award ($2,000), Mayor’s Award ($1,000), and the Viewers’ Choice Award ($1,000).
