Tim Olsen Drawing Prize, 20th Anniversary Exhibition

Congratulations to the winner of the 2020 Tim Olsen Drawing Prize, Monika Cvitanovic Zaper for their work ‘Lineage’. 
 

This work gives form to a complex and layered engagement with matrilineal histories, sensitively and creatively investigating the ways that knowledge is passed on through time across generations. The processual and material aspects of the work speaks to forms of intimacy, vulnerability, and transmission that are particularly pertinent today. It seamlessly merges drawing with craft, while also resonating with the visual language of the digital. The work is confident, mature, conceptually driven and materially sophisticated, taking an expansive approach to contemporary drawing practice that is deserving of the 2020 Tim Olsen Drawing Prize.
 

There are three highly commended students:
 

Eric M. Hoenig for their work ‘A Language of Shadows’
 

 

Ruvé Staneke for their work ‘2020: “You’re On Mute"’
 

 

Anna Seymour for their work ‘Epoch’
 

 

Joshua Alipio
i built my house
Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours)

This work consists of drawings on nine panels, which pop out into puzzle pieces used to build a model house, as well as a 14-second looping stop motion video demonstrating the construction of the model house. 'i built my house' employs an additive drawing process using charcoal, conté, graphite, marker, soft pastels, and print image transfers to depict ideas, the physical qualities, and specific memories associated with my home.

The additive drawing process took place over four weeks, where the steps and drawing methods applied symbolised a particular aspect related to the home. Some of these ideas and methods included floor plan drawings, collages through print image transfers, written descriptions and anecdotes, foot traffic outlines, portrait drawings, and more. The drawing process were repeated on both sides of the nine screen board panels, which were then hand cut to create templates and puzzle pieces used for building the model house.

The concept for this work was inspired by my relationship with my family and home, brought about a moment of reflection whilst quarantining and working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, I wanted to explore living in the same home for over half of my life, as well as the experiences and memories of coexisting with family during a period of physical and mental growth (aka adolescence). I aimed to depict my home for what it is physically, what it looks like visually, and what it represented emotionally. This is shown through the various techniques employed in the drawings, sculpture and video; ranging from floor plan drawings, to room sketches, to the “house noises” present in the video. Furthermore, the model house concept was inspired by the idea of ‘play’ and the association of toys with childhood and growth and the resulting nostalgia and memories.

Alyssa Alzamora
Mirror Mirror
Bachelor of Fine Arts

'Mirror Mirror' is a one-take performative drawing piece which seeks to comment on the messages produced by the beauty and makeup industries and the varying impacts that this can have on oneself. This work was created using a variety of cosmetic items, including foundation, concealer, mascara and many others, which are used to draw directly onto the bathroom mirror. Overlaid onto this work is an audio transcript of the key words used to market each cosmetic product being used. Thus, this work seeks to explore the conflicting dichotomy of makeup and the beauty industry. On one hand, while makeup can be used as a positive form of self-expression and empowerment, the messages the beauty industry relays through their products and marketing can also be very damaging to oneself and that makeup overall can sometimes hinder the way in which one sees themselves.

Liana Berzins
Luminous Beings
Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours)

'Luminous Beings' is a dialogue between my child and adult self; a reflection upon the process of ageing and maturing, and how this change has manifested in me. Each of the five drawings – drawn using a combination of Copic marker and coloured pencil – seeks to articulate which aspects of the self I have retained through this process.

Exploring fears, insecurities and their consequences through the lens of a world outside of my own was, for most of my childhood, the way I would rationalise and resolve problems I encountered. Yet as my understanding of the world matured and changed, the trope of the imagination as being innocent, naïve and childish did not - nor did my dependence upon using imagination as a vehicle to navigate my experience of the world. This created internal discord. 'Luminous Beings' negotiates the reconciliation of these twin concepts as I have aged: not as warring forces, but as two sides of a whole that continue to function in and of each other. The five figures live inside each drawing as pillars of continuity, existing within the realms of both conflict and resolution. They form a self-portrait depicting the continuity of the self from childhood, through dissent, and finally to the present.

Sarah Catania
I’d rather not say
Bachelor of Fine Arts

'I’d rather not say', explores the habit of keeping an emotional distance from others. The work revolves around the desire for others to only know surface level information about me, while keeping anything tactile or serious hidden. Each piece of plastic in the work has a symbol sewn onto it with thread that fades from red to black. Both the thread and the symbols have a connection to me in some way. Only I know the full extent of the connection between myself, the thread and the symbols and by only sewing the outlines, the inside and details of the symbols are hidden to those who view it.

Monika Cvitanovic Zaper
Lineage
Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours)

'Lineage' is a large-scale work that uses both needlework and painting to address my creative connection to the crafts practiced by my female ancestors.

The processes explore the universal impulse to draw a line, first with a threaded needle, then with a brush dipped in paint and were instigated by the nature of the fabric I am using as a substrate. Its gridded structure represents a background traditionally suitable for stitching, which I applied to create lines in all directions, playing with the tension between continuity and discontinuity. I also painted multiple gestural marks that ended up being of a particular quality due to the way the delicate background responded to paint. I sought to purely engage with both media in an expressive manner, contemplating a dot as a point of departure that can extend into a line in every possible direction and even tangle, this process also being symbolic of my own departure from traditional rules of embroidery. 
 

The texture and the smell of the polyester fabric reminded me of the window curtains both my grandmother and my mother sewed themselves and had hanging in their homes and I wanted to give this remnant a new life. Feeling that my making is largely informed by often overlooked traditions of women’s craft, my intention is to bring them with me into the context of contemporary art. By doing so I aim to honour and celebrate the resourcefulness and resilience of the women that shaped me, using materials that speak to me while searching for my own creative voice.

Fatima Farrukh
Sahi se yaad nahi hain
Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours)
 

‘Sahi se yaad nahi hain’ is a digital drawing that depicts my identity as a Pakistani Australian. It was created through traditional drawing processes of text work and repetition and then put through a digital drawing program to create a second layer. I created the work through phonetically translating words in English to Urdu messily as it creates a language only for myself to write in and understand. The mapping of a childhood home on top is an ode to further disconnect to Pakistan, as I cannot recall it clearly anymore, a home I used to visit every year, a part of me, is now gone and fading in my memory, just as my mother tongue and my cultural identity. This artwork explores the connections and disconnects to my heritage and my home, the way growing up in Australia has affected my identity, focussing on creating a visualisation of a hybridised language to communicate my thoughts about myself and who I am.

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Victoria Ferguson
Forget-Me-Not
Bachelor of Fine Arts

Inspired by the artworks of Jenny Saville, 'Forget-Me-Not' consists of two A1 drawings that experiment with erasure and the transparency of charcoal and soft pastels to reproduce two photographs of family members taken on May 6, 2012 during our travels into the city. While depicting a seemingly ordinary event, the images have taken on a deeper meaning as these two members of my family have since passed away. Having revisited the photographs years later, I have applied Saville’s gestural marks and her process of spatial construction to portray memory as something that is ever changing, flexible and obscure. Both of the images have been obscured by faint impressions of limbs and heads which, when layered, capture a sense of rapid movement, similar to the apparent streaking of moving objects that can be seen in a photograph. Through the technique of erasure, together with the continuous layering of bodies, my family members “visually collapse as they become buried, and the new bodies emerge as the dominant forms”, ultimately allowing the viewer to “tune in and out of different realities or passages of time. Like looking at a memory” (Saville, 2016).

Aileen Heal
Digital Mosaic
Bachelor of Fine Arts / Bachelor of Advanced Science

'Digital Mosaic' is a large-scale drawing with coloured pencils on white paper. This drawing was created by initially digitally compositing dozens of photos of myself, that were published in a secret online account in 2017. The process involved pixelating the image and transferring it into a grid of 1cm squares by hand. The artwork is 150cm across, consisting of rows of 150 individual coloured blocks.

This artwork explores the concept of our identity and that which we hide from the public in our digital presence. This manifestation is a process of censoring one’s own face in online channels, despite it being so freely available amongst the public in physical reality, which is common yet contradictory.

The analogue nature of this work, involving the repetitive technique of individually colouring squares, emphasises the arduous yet futile efforts we make to curate our online identity, yet having our flaws openly exposed in reality. This work highlights the cognitive dissonance we experience when we manipulate our image online and how it is incongruent with our reality.

This work highlights the distortion caused by censoring our digital presence, making that which is plain in reality now unrecognisable. Our online selves are so distorted, censored, edited, refined, and curated that the truth becomes indiscernible. Our digital identity is constructed, a mosaic of pixels perfectly curated where all flaws are concealed.

Eric M. Hoenig
A Language of Shadows
Bachelor of Fine Arts

'A Language of Shadows' consists of three monumental concrete tablets presented as a single structure. The surface of each tablet has been broken to reveal an ideogrammatic motif fashioned from steel and alluding to some semantic meaning yet defying comprehension.

Drawing on processes of automatism, each motif is created subconsciously, replicated in the bending, cutting and arrangement of lengths of industrial steel. These intuitive steel drawings are then buried in layers of concrete and, once cured, a hammer and chisel are used to break the surface of the concrete to reveal the lines of the motif once more.

This labour-intensive process mirrors mark-and-erasure in traditional drawing practice, while drawing an analogy to the way in which meaning is uncovered through veils of consciousness, at times a traumatic and arduous endeavour.

This work marks the convergence of two streams of ongoing research: one into the use of drawing in the European occult tradition as a method of evocation, whereby the creation of mystical symbols are destroyed to manifest desire of the practitioner; and the other a material exploration that challenges the notion of drawing as a purely creative act, highlighting the qualities of marks made with destructive force. 

Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours)

'Inheritance' uses handmade paper made by the destruction of dozens of letters written to loved ones, then transformed into paper pulp to create new sheets of paper. These paper sheets were formed using an embroidery hoop, referencing the embroidery practice my mother and grandmother taught me, making up a significant part of my childhood and my relationships with these women. The work also features dried and pressed flowers from my mother and grandmother’s gardens. Honouring this matrilineal knowledge pathway of textile and gardening practice also works to highlight and elevate the care practice which has also transferred through this pathway.

Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours)

 

'Songs for Two Strays (The Gypsy Nomad Identity Crisis Series)' explores straying as an aesthetic and an idea. To stray, according to the Cambridge and Collins Dictionaries, means to lose our way, either physically or with our thoughts, perhaps beyond established boundaries, or on to a track we did not intend to travel.

My imperfect, process-driven drawings stray from traditionally ‘worthy’ art subjects, such as fruit bowls, pleasant pastoral scenes or grand architecture, to the everyday, namely, postcards of my frumpy rescue cat, Rosie. My compositions drift: Rosie’s body might be cut off at just the wrong place, such as halfway across her eye, or she might be nearly off the page or barely recognizable. Similarly, patchy colouring often wanders beyond the lines, while pen marks are scribbled and scrawled, with bits missing, no real blending and only disjointed attempts at accurate representation. Sometimes, Rosie is left alone on the page with nothing to place her at all, while elsewhere, my perspective roams, and lines which might anchor my cat into a context or ‘place’ really only serve to disorient and displace her further. Likewise, the work is optimally viewed through 3D anaglyph (red/cyan) glasses, where disorienting 3D vibrations force viewers’ eyes to physically drift to unexpected places.

Where are my cat and I straying from... and to? Rosie is a stray, the ultimate Other, a (formerly!) homeless outsider. Meanwhile, I am a nomad, a human stray, forging my New Zealand Australian Romany Gypsy hybrid identity. Reflecting our close, yet utterly alien, relationship as human and animal strays, fragments of found vintage Gypsy, Australian and New Zealand music sheet photo releases scatter through the work. Accordingly, tension-filled cat drawings interact with broken, hilariously outdated, yet somehow beautiful songs.

This is an ongoing project of 88 drawings, 64 shown.

Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours)

 

'King Cactus in Terracotta' is a digital collage that uses watercolour, gouache, oil pastel, pen, ceramics, and photography to depict ceramic vessels. It was made through an archival process of collecting past work including sketches, photo documentation, and plans for future ceramics, and compositing these together to create a new composition. Having shifted to a digital practice without the use of a studio over lockdown, I found that through digital manipulation and remix, multiple mediums were able to transcend a single textural materiality and tactility imbedded with the history of process. 'King Cactus in Terracotta' explores a cyclical evolution that embraces making and reworking something until it serves my current practice, taking into consideration the romantic nature of imperfect hand built ceramic vessels in the face of mass production. This work, by incorporating mediums used throughout the process of creating ceramic vessels, from sketches to final photographs, draws attention to the practice of making ceramics itself, and the nostalgia I have for this.

Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours)

 

“3KG of Being” is a performance drawing made by me carrying a cloth rope climbing the stairwell in an abandoned building. The drawing material was a white cloth rope with a lasso 25cm in diameter at the end that tied nothing. The lasso was full of 3KG black ink and left a trace line on the ground while climbing. The performance was photographed by Nikon camera through time-lapse function. This work aims to document life objectively by recording and measuring the distance of my life. Blood contents 7% of the body weight of a person and my weight is 45KG, therefore there are 3KG blood in my body. 3KG of ink symbolizes my existence. When the ink runs out, life runs out. As a result, 3KG of ink equals two and a half floors way long, this is the distance of me being alive. By using performance drawing to record my life, this work explores the objectivity of life existence and the universality of life and death, hoping to give the audience a new objective and rational thinking on life, without excessively pursuing significance, nor fall into the vortex of nihilism under the fear of death and departure. Only know its ordinariness, can know its greatness.

Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours)

 

‘Drawing for 2 colours’ is part of an ongoing series of performative works that use drawing as a medium to connect and embody particular oppositional words, colours and symbols, and often between 2 or 4 hands. These performance stills, intended as both the documentation and work, explore drawing as an offering for colour to come into being through an extension of the self at play between your left and right hand. In this work, black and white is used as a transformational tool to open physical and metaphysical space existent between these two opposites. This is a passage or conversation accessible only through this simultaneous gesture of drawing.

Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours)

 

'The Little Mermaid Colouring Book' is a series of digital drawings that depict feminist subversions of the classic fairy tale “The Little Mermaid”. These works were created in Clip Studio Paint using digital collage and drawing techniques, and were formed through the appropriation of movie stills from Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989) combined with internet images that reference traditional girlhood nostalgia. Once their composition was determined, they were traced to mimic the format of colouring pages. Overall, this series seeks to reexamine “The Little Mermaid” story through an intersectional feminist lens and aims to critique the heteronormative patriarchy and its perpetuation within the developmental realm of childhood.

Tiffany Pham
Untitled
Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours)

'Untitled' is a life size plush sculpture of a headless person, covered in frowny faces. The sculpture base was made using cotton fabric and stuffed with toy filling. The frowny faces were tattooed on using a rotary machine and black ink. The artwork is about my feelings towards my tattooing and art. I’m not as far along as I expected myself to be artistically and it’s been difficult to come to terms with that. A frowny face very simply captures the negative thoughts I have about my art.

Master of Art 

 

'Rental History' is a series of six drawings created with thread and paper to explore the idea of home as something separate from physical structures and transferable from place-to-place. The works were created over a three-week period at Joynton Avenue Creative Centre. The six drawings are based on the floor plans of the artist’s six previous homes. Working in chronological order, and using thread, the interior of each floor plan was stitched into paper. The works were then photographed, reprinted and sent to be exhibited in the homes of exhibition attendees.

The series seeks to translate the non-material feeling of home into material and conceptual outcomes by bringing normally behind-the-scenes materials, thread and floor plans, to the foreground. Additionally, thread connects the disciplines of architecture, drawing and textiles, while also allowing an exploration of body, time and space. 

Bachelor of Fine Arts

 

'Epoch' communicates a progression of time across one scene, documenting and responding to Earth’s past, present and future geological periods. The chronological drawing extends across four landscape panels and was created over a process of four-weeks, using cross hatching and stippling drawing techniques. 'Epoch' aims to cultivate environmental activism and a consciousness of humans’ ecological footprint in the age of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is the current geological era and has risen due to human detrimental impact upon the Earth’s atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic and biospheric systems. Upon conclusion of my illustrative narrative, I represent a prophetic perspective, through an apocalyptic depiction. I thus protest that the impact of anthropogenic activity is global and potentially irreversible. I hope to foster humans’ realisation of their symbiotic relationship with the environment, to ensure Earth’s preservation.

Bachelor of Fine Arts

 

I have always been fascinated by portraits, especially self-ones. It is interesting to hear things like 'I am not my true self today' or 'you don't know the real me' as it makes me wonder what is 'self'. "mind lost its brain" is an ongoing series of self-portraits that investigates a drilling question in my head 'who is the stranger in my head?’. These works are not just what one sees once finished, but the process of creating them is a subconscious ritual that I must perform. This process involves mixing and coating layers of ink and gesso on the surface and sanding and layering over again. I then draw using crackle medium and colour pencils to make shadows and floating figures. 

 

Some say it is a brain disease and others call it a mental illness, either way, its uncertainty makes it a bundle of nerves, like literally. Psychiatrists have been burning the midnight oil to find a perfect medication for the same and, these tablets take you places. In all these kerchunks, scrubbings, stirrings, rolling, cracking, and diffusing, trying to hear the footsteps of the stranger is grinding. Here I am again, still looking for the intruder who keeps telling me, I have lost my mind.

Ruvé Staneke
2020: “You’re On Mute"
Bachelor of Fine Arts / Bachelor of Arts

The triptych '2020: “You’re On Mute”' embodies three drawings on paper, each piece measuring 59.4 x 84.1 centimetres. Exhibiting the use of graphite pencil, fine liner ink pen, and oil paint, this suite pays homage to the three major global events experienced throughout this year thus far.

Beginning with individual photoshoots of the depicted subjects, three photographs were then selected to edit. Afterwards, the blank paper was gridded and outlines of the forms were sketched. Following, the realistic subjects were rendered using the technique of scumbling, as well as the (albeit more painterly) techniques of sfumato and chiaroscuro. Successively, with oil paint specific pieces of clothing were coloured, and the implementation of scribbling in pen hashtags unique to each scene completed the background. Each piece took roughly eighteen hours to complete. The figures were rendered realistically so that the grime component would stand as more distinct (making the work appear collage-like), noting that current life seems more disjointed than something of a linear experience, with each of us being overwhelmed by fragments of feelings, emotions, thoughts, and realities.

'2020: “You’re On Mute”' as a phrase is a play on words; not only referencing the individual pieces as well as the political silencing of the underlying topics, the phrase is also undoubtedly one of the most coined terms I have heard expressed this year through online platforms. Conclusively, this triptych allegorically exhibits three prevalent events experienced this year—all of which require our attention. These are: Climate Change, the Black Lives Matter movement, and COVID-19. '2020: “You’re On Mute”' solidifies what has occurred this year in the hope that we can, in retrospection, identify how we as the human race have transformed for the better as a result of the current hardship endured by all people.

Bachelor of Fine Arts

This artwork is a series of four videos which feature an interaction between and audio-reactive 3d visual and ambient audio tracks. The visuals were created using a program called Max 8 and audio was created using a website called PIXELSYNTH.

The creation of these artworks took place over the span of a month or so, as the result of much experimentation and learning within Max. The patch I used to make the artwork primarily uses the Jitter package within Max to create a 3d gridshape which expands and contracts in response to the volume of an audio input, either from a file or a microphone. The Audio files were created by inserting a picture into the PIXELSYNTH site which converts images into MIDI synth sounds, altered by various controls embedded into the site such as harmonic limitations and image positioning. The images selected for this were chosen to be representative (either literally or metaphorically) of different relationships in my life which I feel have inspired me.

That is, in essence, what this series of works is centred around; the celebration of relationships which I have fed on to create up until this point. These relationships also share a common thread of influencing my personal taste in music as well as art, hence this artwork's marriage of audio and visuals. 

 

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Bachelor of Fine Arts

The triptych ‘Mental’ is a self portrait that explores my personal struggle with mental health at a younger age. Using drawing techniques paint was applied to the body in front of a mirror over a nine-hour process. The conscious decision to use my naked body as a canvas allows this work to become incredibly intimate between subject and subject matter. By using this medium as a therapeutic tool I am able to unlock personal trauma deep within, physically bringing it to the surface in order to grow and learn about myself.

The biggest threat to happiness is yourself, when the inner demons finally escape through the cracks in your being and manage to destroy everything that is good. Feeling trapped within this mental prison with no end in sight, you pin a smile upon your face to avoid suspicion from others. This work is raw and honest, exposing my personal journey through depression so that others hiding behind their skin can feel less alone in this very real battle.