Jacqui Stockdale, The Nature Maker.Courtesy Art Gallery of NSW. |
The Art Life has a long-ish post reviewing the Wynn, Sulman and Photographic Portrait Prizes (decided at the same time as the much more famous Archibald Prize for portraiture). Actually, although TAL has some interesting comments on the Wynn and Sulman, he/she spends most time reviewing the Photographic Portrait Prize (apparently mostly because it’s the only one of the three for which the Art Gallery of NSW makes available copies of images to reviewers).
Here’s how TAL summarises the Portrait Prize selection and deescribes the above arresting image:
In this year’s finalists there were plenty of tricky images of well known people, gallerists, actors, musicians and self portraits, but few actually provided something beyond the obvious. One image that did go further was Jacqui Stockdale‘s portrait of fellow artist Kate Rohde, the sculptor/installation artist who makes elaborate installations of faux fur animals in faux museum settings. There’s something unnerving about the way Stockdale captures Rohde, a playful innocent sort of gaze with the devilish creature she’s gently stroking in her hands. The tree fronds in the backgrounds are taken from an early European painting of the Australian landscape, a subtle and genuinely amusing reference to the fantasy element of Rohde’s own work and its links back to the earliest Colonial art.
The whole review is worth reading.
Now Jacqui is an old Hobart acquaintance of mine, so I am very please to see her work on troppo, bit of a shock really, she has also done the official oil of Tasmania’s current Catholic Archbishop Doyle, which I find far more shocking than this friendly piece.