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Art Almanac congratulates Tasmanian-based artist Joanna Chew, winner of the Glover Prize 2023.
Chew’s winning artwork titled Tender reflects the broken housing market in Hobart. The artist’s statement explains:
“Images of tents and caravans were frequently in the news at the beginning of 2018 when my daughter and I moved back to Hobart. We lived with my parents for a year, unable to find a rental we could afford. It was easy to see why more and more people were forced into solutions like setting up a temporary home at the Showgrounds – an option that will cease within the coming months.
This painting is a reflection on a broken housing market, and a rental market that prevents many from entering it.
The central piece of this work is framed either end with horizontal bands that reference two works by John Glover – Mount Wellington with rainbow from sketchbook 43, and weeds from the bottom of Cattle, the last Gleam of the Setting Sun. I remember seeing prize cows at the Showgrounds as a kid; since returning home kids have been growing up there in tents and caravans.
Permission was sought and granted to use Nikki Davis-Jones’ photograph of a working family’s campsite at the Showgrounds as the central source image for this painting.”
Joanna Chew, Tender
Chew has won $75,000 and a bronze maquette of colonial artist, John Glover, after whom the Glover Prize is named.
Judges Suzanne Cotter, Bill Nuttall, and Lucienne Rickard, address the artwork’s connection between contemporary life and the history of painting, as well as John Glover:
“The diversity and high level of finalists for this year’s John Glover Prize made for long and rich discussion. Chews’ painting Tender stood out in its ambition and layered visual narrative. It is a complex painting that addresses contemporary life and themes of home and belonging at the same time as it speaks to a history of painting and the figure of John Glover himself, whose landscapes can be understood as a search for self-recognition in a world that was not his own.”
Two other finalist artworks have been Highly Commended: Christine Fontana for Inexhaustible Bounty, and Romany Mollison for I’ll Wait for You.
“These distinctive works offer a further reflection on the idea of landscape as artistic form,” said the judges. “Fontana’s intricately constructed and physically textured work draws us into a moving narrative of temporal overlays of Tasmania’s colonial settlement in our present. Mollison’s evocative painting of a remote location on Flinders Island is imbued with pictorial atmosphere and movement combined with the seductive sensuousness of pure painting.”
Two more prizes are to be awarded as part of the Glover Prize 2023 with the People’s Choice and Children’s Choice Awards being drawn on the final day of the exhibition. The winners of these popular votes will receive $3,000 and $500 prize money, respectively. The exhibition of finalists’ works are on view at the historic Falls Park Pavilion in Evandale, Tasmania, from 11 to 19 March 2023.
