The Annual School of Art Drawing Prize 2015 presents student artworks from all disciplines and workshops from the ANU School of Art. 

This year the School of Art Gallery is pleased to announce the selected winner for the School of Art Drawing Prize is Sally O’Callaghan, an Honours student studying in the Painting workshop.

There were also a highly commended artist: Madisyn Zabel an Honours student from the Glass workshop.

Many thanks to all those participated and I do encourage you to submit again next year.
Many thanks also to this year’s judge, Tony Curran. Tony is currently a visiting artist in the School of Art's Painting workshop and a PhD candidate at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga. Tony's judge's comments are below.

Thanks to this year’s selection judges: Gilbert Riedelbauch, Graduate Coursework Convenor and Head of Foundation Studies and Raquel Ormella, Honours Convenor (Visual Arts and Design Arts). Thanks also go out to curatorial students Bianca Hill, Alysha Redston and Xi Yi from the Centre for Art History and Art Theory (CAHAT) who assisted with the organisation, layout and installation of the Prize.

This prize was originally established and is supported by Jan Brown, former long serving member of staff and Head of Foundation at the ANU School of Art and significant Australian artist.

ANU School of Art Drawing Prize 2015
Judge’s Comments

This year's exhibition of finalists provokes the lingering question - what is drawing? The responses by the artists, designers and craftspeople encompass traditional, conceptual, sculptural and technological solutions to that problem and makes it clear that drawing is a practice rather than a medium. It is post-medium in the sense that transcends a medium specific definition of art and design and it is pre-medium in the sense that the practice of drawing leads to the generation of ideas and processes within art, design and craft disciplines. Mel Douglas's

Sweep, tests our understanding of drawing by presenting us with a curved black field made of glass. The proportions of Douglas's work, however, indicate the most basic element of drawing, that of a carbon black line. Bryan Foong's I am after all, my father shows us drawing as an interrogation and study of the subject.

While being a site for idea generation and exploration a drawing can also be a finished object.  There are works in this year's drawing prize that extend beyond the flat page and into three dimensions. Two drawings this year incorporate this finished quality of drawing while also representing drawing as an investigation into subject and materiality. Madisyn Zabel's glass installation has earned a place as Highly Commended for its ability to incorporate multiple aspects of the drawn line which hark back to the Renaissance geometry drawings of Platonic Solids.

This year's winner managed to combine multiple facets of drawing into a cohesively managed finished drawing that balances colour, form and experimentation with media. I would like to congratulate the winner, Sally O'Callaghan for her work, Untitled, which balances line, colour and shape, abstraction and figuration. The use of materials - threads and acrylics combine to create a complicated spatial structure within the pictorial field and through it into the third dimension. This work in particular captures the essence of drawing as experimentation of materials, ideas, line and brings these to pictorial resolution.

I would also like to congratulate all the finalists each of whom have expanded this exhibition's argument of what drawing is and can be.

Tony Curran
August 2015

IMAGE DETAILS: Sally O'Callaghan, Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours), Painting Workshop, Untitled, 2015, acrylic and cotton thread on Chiffon and tulle, pine frame, 65.5 x 71 x 5.2 cm