NATASHA WALSH highly commended in the Portia Geach Memorial Award

August 21, 2020

The Portia Geach Memorial Award is Australia’s most prestigious art prize for portraiture by women artists. Walsh’s ‘Doppelgänger (self portrait)’ has been awarded a highly commended for how she translates her studio surroundings onto marble through the reflection of a small convex mirror. “I was interested in how it bent the space in my studio – an interesting object that seemed to look at the world around it. The flat luminous space of the marble was thereby seemingly pushed out and into space by a very fine application of pigment in oil.”

Walsh goes on to say in an interview with Frankie Magazine, “I enjoy working with mediums that resist me and which provide the most room for experimentation. This is because I love to discover my own way into things and I enjoy the results of a struggle or negotiation between my will and a material’s nature. My earlier works include wax and resin, and I’ve also made works with copper. I have been interested in copper’s conductive properties as well as the transformative nature of its oxidation as it reacts to the pigments I’ve mixed and applied.” You can read the full article here.

Held at S.H. Ervin Gallery, the non-acquisitive prize is awarded for the entry which is of the highest artistic merit, ‘…for the best portrait painted from life of some man or woman distinguished in Art, Letters, or the Sciences by after any female resident.” Find out more about the Portia Geach Award exhibition from the S.H. Ervin Gallery website.