My work "Emerge" has been selected as a finalist for Australia's most distinguished portrait prize for female artists. From over 360 entries a list of 54 finalists has been announced the Portia Geach Memorial Award with $30,000 in prize money.
Portia Geach Memorial Award
SH Ervin Gallery
Sydney
Fri 20 October 2017 until Sun 26 November 2017
"The Portia Geach Memorial Award has nurtured emerging and established artists to exhibit quality works competitively in their field, while celebrating the promotion of female artists. Established in 1961 by Florence Kate Geach, in memory of her sister, artist Portia Geach, the Portia Geach Memorial Award recognises an Australian female artist for the best portrait painted from life of a man or woman distinguished in art, letters or the sciences.
Born in 1873 in Melbourne, Portia Geach studied with John Singer Sargent and Lawrence Alma-Tadema in London and was also a lifelong activist for women’s rights. She established the Housewives Progressive Association of New South Wales, The Housewives Magazine in 1933 and the Progressive Journal two years later to promote issues such as equal pay for women and the right to hold public office." http://www.artistprofile.com.au/portia-geach-finalists/
CLAIRE BRIDGE
Emerge (Tamara Dean, Artist)
oil on linen
123 x 123 cm
It is a transition of soul to enter the dark woods. It was Dante who recognised this, writing, “In the middle of the road of life I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost”.
“Emerge” is a portrait of artist Tamara Dean. Emerge is about moving through liminal spaces, between the shadows and the light. Of entering alchemical ritual mystery, the hidden and unseen spaces, and emerging changed, of being lost and finding oneself. Much of Dean’s own work is located within the elements of nature and specifically within ritual, in the soft, glowing effusion of light between day and night where human and nature are inextricably merging and emerging. My own practice is at this juncture also, in the heart of the relationship between humanity and our earth at this precipice of change. In this way, there is a merging of heart and vision in our ways of working and being in the world. Dean has a beautiful integrity in her life and art, where one is also the other. Here is the moment where we, (artist and subject now merged), emerge from the dark wood, changed, carrying both the light and darkness within us.”
