It’s a double win for Victorian-based artist and last year’s Glover Prize winner, Jennifer Riddle, who has won the Glover Prize 2023 People’s Choice Award and Children’s Choice award for her artwork titled Reflections and Reverence.
This is Riddle’s sixth year selected as a Glover Prize finalist; she previously featured in the 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2022 Glover Prize exhibitions. This is the second time Riddle has won both the People’s Choice Award and the Children’s Choice Award in the same year, with the first time being in 2017. In 2019, she was awarded the People’s Choice Award again.
Jennifer Riddle with her artwork ‘Reflections and Reverence’, synthetic polymer on canvas, 186 × 186cm
Commenting on this year’s winning artwork, Riddle states:
Our wilderness has long been the muse for artists throughout history. But today, in this increasingly rare, ancient landscape, I cannot help but feel a stir of emotions that go beyond the awe and sublime.
Here, on Bathurst Harbour in Tasmania’s Southwest, you can see the endurance of time in the glacial-formed quartzite landscape and the age-old trees that cling to the Celery Top Islands, as they have done centuries before. Yet, alarmingly, this primordial, enduring landscape is now an endangered rarity in the era of our Anthropocene world.
With sentiments concerning humanity’s fractured connection to the natural world, I reflect on this land’s ancestral heritage of the Needwonnee Peoples, whose deep reciprocal relationship with the land and sea can be seen and felt today. Establishing or reuniting our reciprocal relationship and innate connection to nature is imperative to our earth’s healing.
Riddle concludes,
“Drawing upon my emotional connection and observations surrounding the effects of nature on our physical and emotional well-being, I aim to create an intangible space within this work, a sublimity that generates a raw and primal reunion with nature – a place for reflection, reverence, empathy and hope.”
The Glover Prize was open to the public from 11 to 19 March 2023 at the historic Falls Park Pavilion in Evandale, Tasmania. As always, the exhibition promised a collection of artworks that present the Tasmanian landscape in its broadest sense.
Read about the Glover Prize 2023 overall winner here.
