Peter Dornauf – 13 August, 2025

Art awards, particularly at a national level, are curious beasts. The upside is that the public get to see a snapshot of what artists, at the cutting edge, are currently up to.

The downside is, of necessity, that the numbers are restricted. In the present case, the National Contemporary Art Award at Te Whare Taonga o Waikato Museum and Gallery had 480 entrants but only 53 were allowed to be selected. Considerations of space. It is a real shame. There is almost a case to be made for a Salon des Refusés.

The other thing about these awards is how they reveal the knack of the artist at reading the room. For this show, judged by Nigel Borell, there was a real preponderance of works that dealt with the issue of identity in all its various manifestations in one way or another.

The winning work was one of those, by local artist Zena Elliott. Part wall sculpture, part painting, it included Elliott’s trademark style, employing brightly coloured abstract forms, this time playing across the open, but chained mouth of a modernised version of a Māori carving. The title of the work, The Silence Forced Upon Us Is Louder Than the Crown’s Declaration of Partnership and Fairness, left the viewer in no doubt as to the polemic involved.’

It was especially pleasing to see the judge select a wide range of styles and media in his lineup of works, everything from sculpture, fabric, found objects, and photography to painterly forms that ranged from superrealism through to abstraction, conceptualism and expressionism.

Of those, Dita Angeles’s Composition of Identity - Series 2, was a complete stunner. Identity was the subject, but the treatment was exceptional, both in compositional format and photorealist style. An outstanding piece.

The runner-up was a surprise - a traditional looking landscape entitled What the Land Remembers, by Leanne Mulder. However, what this standard image did display was a nice tension between bold, almost graphic, design elements and fine painted subtleties.

Others of note were Katherine Throne’s Rosemary for Cooking, a conventional enough still life of a bowl of flowers, but the impasto treatment was a thing to behold—paint put on so thick you could almost eat it. Adroit manipulative skills were involved here, made all the more adept with the employment of muted colours.

Skilled handling of paint was also evident in Hana Carpenter’s The Line is Me, exercising a lovely controlled sfumato modulation of paint to create an evocative abstract, housed somewhat hauntingly ‘inside’ a box structure.

A similarly controlled and expansive use of brushwork was seen in another landscape work, Puke by Merthyr Ruxton, to create a brooding feel to sky and land. What added to the visual pleasure here was the use of a very old and ornate gilded frame to house the canvas, setting off a nice frisson between the modern and the antiquated.

Of the conceptual pieces, James Ford and his etched glass mirror quoting Heraclitus (You Can’t Step In the Same River Twice) was an inventive and arresting format.

In terms of visual impact, Jodie Tipa’s ‘river’ of black building paper (Faith in Moeraki) taking up half the wall and floor with its triangular configurations, took the prize, while of the sculptural works, Sudhir Duppati’s exploration of mortality, in Eulogy to the Eternal Soul, dealing with memory and grief, was a memorable work—a waka on wheels, complete with an embossed quote from Colin McCahon.

For sheer variety this show is well worth a visit. The judge is commended for his inclusive selection over a wide and comprehensive range of engaging art works.

Peter Dornauf

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