Congratulations to Erica Seccombe, Foundation Lecturer and Post Graduate Coursework Convenor, who has won the Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize with her video artwork Metamorphosis. SOA&D Painting Alumni Hayley Lander has also won the Emerging artist category.

Metamorphosis is a transformative, aesthetically beautiful time-lapse experience that provides a unique perspective of a virtual pupating fly. It is a result of Erica’s creative research into scientific visualisation of volumetric, or ‘virtual’ data acquired from 3D microcomputed X-ray tomography.

Judges said that Erica had "captured the spirit of the prize with a work that took as its foundation the ordinarily unseen intersection between science and art. Metamorphosis represents a deep collaboration between scientific and aesthetic enquiry, with the tools of one being instrumental to the realisation of the other. While at one level the video documents the metamorphosis of a pupating fly, from maggot to fully formed insect, at another it works to enlarge our understanding of the mysterious cycles of life itself."

Also hailing from the Canberra region, Hayley Lander has been named the winner of the Emerging artist category in the 2018 Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize, with her piece The great forgetting.

The great forgetting acts as a meditation on Eucalyptus species as a pivotal element in Australian history, shaping our identity and development as a country to this day.

The highly considered, painterly sophistication of Lander’s work impressed the judging panel, who felt it belied her relative inexperience. "While an affecting and poignant study in natural history, at one level, the work employed compositional devices more familiar to traditional trompe l’oeil painting at another. The unexpectedly surrealist scaffolding and counter-weighting of its principal subject – eucalyptus leaves in various states of decay – made it a compelling choice."

Read more about Erica's research here.