The 67th Blake Prize winners

Congratulations to Sydney artist S J Norman for winning The 67th Blake Prize, one of Australia’s longest-standing and most prestigious art prizes and a biennial event that engages local and international contemporary artists in conversations on the broader experience of spirituality, religion, and belief.

Norman will receive a $35,000 cash prize for his winning photographic diptych, Cicatrix (All that was taken, all that remains), 2019, which documents 147 incisions which were made on the skin of the artist’s back over a ritual work lasting 147 minutes to recognise the 147 Aboriginal people who have lost their lives while in police custody over the last decade. 

“This is a subject of national importance,” note this year’s judges: Megan Monte, the inaugural Director of Ngununggula; Abdul Abdullah, a significant Australian multi-disciplinary artist and Rosemary Crumlin OAM, a Sister of Mercy, art historian, educator and exhibition curator with a special interest in art and spirituality – who “were also impressed by the ways the artist explore[d] ideas of scarification and ceremonial languages of Aboriginal peoples into the work. Cicatrix, and the artist’s practice, resonates with the themes of this Prize but also has the potential to expand how contemporary audiences engage with the themes of spirituality, belief and religion in our contemporary Australian context.”

S J Norman, Cicatrix (All that was taken, all that remains), 2019. Photograph: Ricardo Martinez Roa

In the work, Norman stages a personal reclamation of the ancestral mourning rights he has been divested of as a Wiradjuri person. Cicatrix invites a consideration of the body as a vessel of complex grief, and the wound as a technology of transmutation.

Additional winners include:

Katy B Plummer of Annandale, New , who took out the Established Artist Residency prize for her interactive audiovisual multi-platform work WE ARE ALL ASTONISHINGLY WISE. Plummer’s work features a good-natured oracle that interacts with the audience, that holds up poetic texts and a QR code that, when scanned, offers possible interpretations of the text by two Diviners. As a part of her prize, Plummer receives a residency and solo exhibition at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre (CPAC), Western Sydney.

Queens Park WA resident Sakinah Alatas was awarded the Emerging Artist Prize for her work “Qadarullah” (Divine decree), an introspective piece that uses a Muslim prayer mat to explore the artist’s feelings of surrendering to God’s will after losing her mother and giving birth in the same week. Alatas receives $6,000 as a part of her prize and her work is acquired into the Liverpool City Council Collection.

The 65 finalist works are currently on exhibition at CPAC until Sunday 22 May 2022.

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