COFA artists take out Blake Prize and Sculpture by the Sea

12 November 2003

COFA honours photomedia student Shoufay Derz has won this year's $10,000 Blake Prize for religious art with a mysterious, evocative digital work entitled Linking back (Part1).

The prize was announced today. One of the Blake judges, senior lecturer in visual art at the Australian Catholic University Judith Carroll, described Linking back as "deeply spiritual", praising its simplicity, elegance and the tension within it between light and dark.

Derz, 24, said she wanted to convey a feeling of mystery and wonder and to inspire contemplation with the work, which consists of three panels, each featuring a digital image face-mounted behind perspex.

"My hope was to allude to a sense of 'before' perhaps to a place beyond what is concealed by appearances," she said.

She said she also wanted the contemplative and introspective work to have an "enclosing feeling".

Although she doesn't belong to any religious tradition, Derz is interested in expressing spirituality in her work. Sufi poet Jelaluddin Rumi was one of the sources of inspiration for the work.

She is particularly interested in Rumi's notion of being in the world and connected to it, but also being separate from it, a theme she has researched this year.

She described the win as "very encouraging", and plans to use the prize money to finance further study next year or to travel.

Of 310 entries this year, 81 works were hung for the Sydney exhibition of the Blake Prize, at Sir Hermann Black Gallery. Twenty-eight works have been chosen for the touring Blake.

Professor wins Sculpture by the Sea

In another significant win for a COFA artist, COFA Adjunct Professor, Richard Goodwin, won the $20,000 Sydney Water Sculpture by the Sea prize.

Goodwin's work Carapace, was selected from 99 entries on show this year.

Goodwin, who previously worked as an architect, said the winning work "concerns itself with the relation between the body and architecture".

"It places a car, one of our common carapaces, and takes a Mercedes, an iconic kind of car, and explodes it and turns it into what a I call a body building."

The work is all white because Goodwin says he wanted it to "stand out and be quite beautiful and sit in the landscape in a fairly blatant place".

"It could almost be like a holiday house for the dispossessed."

Sculpture by the Sea is on show until November 16, along the Bondi to Tamara coast walk.

Carapace is on display at Marks Park, Bondi, on the northern end of the walk.