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 awarded last month. 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 and elegance.

Derz, 24, said she wanted to convey a feeling of mystery and wonder and to inspire contemplation with the work.

Linking back consists of three panels, each featuring a digital image face-mounted behind perspex, which gives the work a dense feel and reflects the viewer back into it.

“I’m definitely someone that thinks too much … that’s why I want to produce works that are more meditative. It’s my own desire to break down those mental boundaries.”

She said she also wanted the hushed, introspective work to have an “enclosing feeling”.

“My work is certainly wanting to approach that sort of hidden-ness … being torn between [elements of light and dark], or living in a sort of environment which is surrounded by so much difficulty. That is what I’m trying to grapple with.”

Although she doesn’t belong to any religious tradition, spirituality is a recurring theme in her work. Sufi poet Jelaluddin Rumi was one of the sources of inspiration for Linking back.
Derz said she was 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 “incredibly encouraging”, and plans to finance other works of art with the prize money. She has applied to do a masters degree at COFA next year.

Of 310 entries this year, 81 works were hung for the Sydney exhibition of the Blake Prize, at Sydney University’s Sir Hermann Black Gallery. The exhibition will be on show until December 13.

Professor wins Sculpture by the Sea
In another significant win for a COFA artist, 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 along the Bondi to Tamarama coast walk last month.
Goodwin, who previously worked as an architect, said Carapace “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 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.”
Goodwin said Sculpture by the Sea, which is now in its seventh year, has been so successful partly because of the “incredible captive audience” of people who walk the Bondi to Tamarama track.

The exhibition also brings public art into what is a quintessentially Sydney space.

“Sydney is a series of streets rather than plazas and spaces. Some of our best public spaces [like the walk] are strangely linear.”

Shoufay Derz and Linking Back (Part 1)

Carapace