Kiersten Fishburn, Director of the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, has today announced that Yardena Kurulkar from Mumbai, India has won the 64th Blake Art Prize for her work Kenosis.
The Blake Art Prize is Australia’s longest standing and most prestigious art prize which encourages conversation about spirituality and religion through art. This year’s prize saw 594 entries whittled down to 80 finalists.
CPAC Director Kiersten Fishburn said: “There was an extremely high calibre of entrants for the Blake Prize by some of the world’s most regarded artists. I congratulate Yardena Kurulkar. Her work was a unanimous choice by our judges.
There is something primal and rich about the use terracotta and the form of the heart – for me the work has many allusions from the Venus of Willendorf and her fecund life giving form, to our common and universal understanding that eventually for all of us our corporeal form decays and ends. The work is a moment of both life and death. This year’s Blake Prize is one of the best in its history – we have so much diversity from traditional art techniques to video works.”
In speaking about her winning piece, Kenosis, Yardena said: “I create moments of confrontations between life and death. My works are acts of surrender to the inevitability of an end and are presented as part of a cycle of continuous regeneration, whereby discovering my own mortality and contemplating on our collective fear of death.
In ‘Kenosis, 2015, I use a terracotta replica (made with the help of 3D printing) of my own heart. The heart is the first organ to develop in a foetus. I use water to portray the passage of time and also as an agent of purging. I let the viewer see what remains of this union – a heart-shaped something, a mere lump of clay.
Pausing to reflect on the shape shifting ability of human nature and probably time itself I shun the need to regenerate, rather focusing on the reconstruction that human anatomy endures. This work is an attempt to capture the erosion, resurrection and elusiveness of human life”
Along with the announcement of Kurulkar’s success, it was also announced that Damien Shen was awarded the Emerging Artist Award, which is $6000 for the acquisitive prize for his work On the fabric of the Ngarrindjeri body; and Robert Hague for his work This Messenger has won the inaugural Blake Residency program – a one-month residency at CPAC and a solo exhibition which will be unveiled at the 2018 Blake exhibition program.
The judges for the 64th Blake Art Prize were Reverend Tim Costello, CEO of World Vision Australia, artist Leanne Tobin and Professor Amanda Lawson, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Wollongong.
The Blake Prize exhibition is presented free of charge and will open to the public on 13 February until 24 April 2016 at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre. Following the exhibition at CPAC The Blake Prize will then tour to a number of galleries around Australia.
For more information: http://www.casulapowerhouse.com
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