Natasha Walsh Wins Mosman Art Prize

On September 25, Sydney-based artist Natasha Walsh was announced winner of the prestigious AUD 50,000 acquisitive Mosman Art Prize for her small-scale, oil-on-copper self-portrait, The Cicada (2018). Born in 1994, Walsh is one of the youngest recipients of the prize since it was established in 1947, the year Australian painter Margaret Olley won with New England Landscape (1947), also aged 24. 

At the award ceremony, Walsh told ArtAsiaPacific that her work is primarily about vulnerability and self-awareness, as well as impermanence and change. Walsh has been working on her series of oil-on-copper works for three years, honing her delicate and ethereal aesthetic. On her exploration of self-portraiture, she remarked: “The act of seeing, observing the passage of time, becomes more like a memory, and you can only do that with the immediacy of the self-portrait.”

Earlier this year, on August 3, Walsh was presented with the AUD 50,000 Kilgour Prize for an intimate oil-on-marble work titled Within the Studio (Self-Portrait) (2017); on September 6, she was awarded the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, receiving a three-month residency at the Cité International des Arts in Paris, plus a AUD 40,000 cash grant to support a research trip in Europe, which she intends to take next June.

Walsh graduated from Sydney’s National Art School with a Master of Fine Art in painting last year. In 2015, she clinched the Mosman Art Prize Emerging Artist Award.

The 2018 edition of the Mosman Art Prize was judged and presented by Australian artist Cressida Campbell, who took home the top prize in 1989. Other awardees announced at the 2018 ceremony were painter Zoe Young, who received the Margaret Olley Commendation Award; multimedia artist Khaled Sabsabi, winner of the Allan Gamble Award; and painter Becky Gibson, who picked up the Guy Warren Emerging Artists’ Award. 

Michael Young is a contributing editor of ArtAsiaPacific.

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