The 2026 Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing $25,000 acquisitive winner is Victoria-based artist Shannon Field with Unnatural History (Bat Blue) – a charcoal and oil paint stick on paper exploring themes of environmental precarity, fragmented representation, and the instability of contemporary ecosystems.
Shannon Field, Unnatural History (Bat Blue), 2026, charcoal and oil stick on paper. Winner of the 2026 Perry Prize / Courtesy the artist and Adelaide Perry Gallery, Sydney
Selected from forty-one finalists, its title – a play on words – refers to both the nineteenth-century Natural History Museum with its notions of colonialism, control, and display, and a present moment sense that we are witnessing animal destruction at a level that is completely unnatural.
