Congratulations to New South Wales-based artist Sophie Cape, winner of the 2025 Hadley’s Art Prize – a $100,000 annual acquisitive prize awarded to the most outstanding portrayal of the Australian landscape –for her work Thunder shifts the shivering sands.
Cape’s work was selected out of twenty-nine finalists by an expert judging panel comprising Southern Kaantju/Umpila woman and multidisciplinary artist Naomi Hobson; Director, Curatorial and Cultural Collections at the University of Tasmania, Caine Chennatt; and leading Tasmanian-based artist Catherine Woo.
Sophie Cape, Thunder shifts the shivering sands
A former professional athlete, Sophie Cape turned to art after years of sport-related injuries. Cape’s practice is deeply tied to the raw forces of nature and the physicality of the body, the artist often immersing herself in the landscape and using locally-sourced natural materials, such as soil, rust and charcoal, to render instinctual acts of expression.
Her winning work, Thunder shifts the shivering sands, was created in Southern NSW after the 2024 floods and resulting landslides. Cape worked within a soaked landscape of rust-stained floodwaters and blood-stained soil, offering a portrait of the Australian landscape in all its power and poetry. “The painting,” says Cape, “is a portrait of survival and decay, beauty and destruction.”
The 2025 judging panel said: “Sophie Cape’s portrayal of the Australian landscape was remarkably executed, compelling, and resonant. Her work is a strong embodied, site-responsive, and honest record of environmental upheaval, of land torn by flood and landslide. Combining the gathering of raw and found materials from the environment with the expressive force of the artist’s body, it exults in this confluence, melding matter, natural marks and a perceptible, visceral relationship between human presence in the non-human world. The artist brings an almost primal energy to the work, but with instinct and finesse, produces a compelling work of balance and refinement. Congratulations to Sophie, and to all of this year’s finalists which were of exceptionally high calibre.”
Alongside the major prize winner, the $10,000 Hadley’s Residency Prize was awarded to Denise (De) Lamby (QLD) and Honourable Mentions were awarded to Elizabeth Kunoth Kngwarray (NT), Sara Maher (TAS), Valerie Sparks (TAS) and Philip Wolfhagen (TAS).
The 2025 Hadley’s Art Prize finalist exhibition is open at Hadley’s Orient Hotel, Hobart TAS 7000, from 29 August to 21 September 2025.
