Art Almanac warmly congratulates the winners of the 2023 Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize: Maria-Fernanda Cardoso, Alethea Richter, and Freyja Fristad.
Cardoso received the Professional Artist Prize of $35,000 for her work Actual Size V (Maratus Madelineae), 2023, winning $35,000 in Australia’s highest-value professional artist prize for women. Jennifer Turpin, practising artist, one of the judges and Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize Patron, says:
“Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s is an artist who’s three decades of practice is focused on keen observation of nature, often the minutiae. Combining art and science, her work is always playful and revealing of nature’s wonders. Actual Size V (Maratus Madelineae), a spectacular image of a tiny spider magnified to a gigantic scale, reveals the extraordinary patterns, colours and textures of nature that we don’t often get to see.”
Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Actual Size V (Maratus Madelineae), 2023.
Emerging Artist Prize of $5,000 was awarded to Richter for her silkscreen artwork Untitled (Dissolution1), which the judges described as “a myriad of coloured dots that make up an image that is as mesmerizing and transfixing as a video screen.” They further commented on the artwork, acknowledging the great sophistication shown by the artist despite the her youth saying, “It really draws you from a distance and rewards you on a closer view, with the reveal of the details, the intricacy, and the subtlety.”
Fristad, Wiradjuri artist, has won the Indigenous Emerging Artist Prize for her artwork Interference of Perception: Rhopography (Lamp). “It is quite brilliant the way the light is revealed very cleverly in a series of horizontal lines,” said the judges. “This is an artwork that is not a traditional Indigenous artwork, but has some remembrances of traditional practice. It is a very beautiful contemporary work.”
The 2023 Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize finalist exhibition is on view at Ravenswood School for Girls, Gordon, New South Wales, from 13 to 28 May 2023. Artworks are also on sale online.
