A 64-page Photocopy Wins Art Award
The Age
Wednesday February 14, 1996
The Moet and Chandon art prize has entered the digital age.
A 64-page computer-mediated photocopy image has won one of the country's richest art prizes, knocking out traditional art forms in the prize's first year of all-media competition.
An unsuspecting Judith Anne Kentish accepted the $50,000 fellowship for artists under 35 in the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria for her photocopied version of an ink and wash drawing, Breath Carapace.
Flummoxed by her win, Ms Kentish, 33, stammered a few words of thanks and later grimaced to a friend: ``They don't want dags doing this!" It was a heartfelt cry. If the choice surprised the 500 assembled for the announcement, it also managed to stump Ms Kentish.
``Dark horses don't win this, do they?" she said; but her win was in keeping with the often surprising nature of the award.
The prize allows an artist to live and work in France for a year.
The judges, including an art historian, Terry Smith, the gallery's curator of Australian art, John McPhee, and an artist, Pat Hoffie, compared Ms Kentish's work to the flower paintings of Georgia O'Keefe, and described the image as representing ``a residue of sweet air exhaled but not lost".
Ms Kentish, who said a computer did not play a primary role in the production of the image, described the work as an investigation of the ephemeral connections between body and mind. The key was not the technology used but the connections made while creating the work, she said.
Ms Kentish, who completed a degree in visual arts at the Queensland University of Technology, said the work started as a three-dimensional wire and cloth wall-piece, before being interpreted as a drawing, then a photocopy. She said using a computer was the most convenient way to process the image into a photocopied form.
Ms Kentish was chosen from 23 finalists, including Victorians Malcolm Bywaters, Angela Brennan, Gail Hastings, Kerrie Poliness and Louis Pratt, who is a son of Ms Blanche d'Alpuget. Ms d'Alpuget attended the function with her husband, the former Prime Minister, Mr Hawke.
The foundation also gave the gallery $50,000 to acquire contemporary works of art by Australian artists.
The gallery's director, Dr Timothy Potts, said the money would be used to buy work by some of the 200 Moet and Chandon finalists of the past 10 years.
© 1996 The Age