2026 Kedumba Drawing Award - Winner, Emerging Artist Award and Highly Commended Recipients

Drawing is the anatomy of my arts practice. Life drawing is particular in that certain parameters such as time shape the form. I have drawn at Walker Street above Lavender Bay on Sydney’s North Shore since the mid-nineties. Benedicta is a model I have drawn many times. Drawing from life occupies a tension between observational discipline and lyrical freedom that can be deeply rewarding and informs all my art making.

Artist Statement

Various States #4 explores the materiality of paper as a metaphor for skin. Like flesh, paper is delicate and marked by time; it folds, wrinkles, creases, and tears, carrying the memory of pressure and movement.
This drawing is from a series that documents the gradual transformation of a single sheet of paper. I repeatedly scrunched and smoothed the surface, recording each stage of its evolution. In Various States #4, the paper begins to degrade, revealing what it has endured: frayed edges, slight tears, and a soft collapse of structure as form gives way to fragility.

The Darling-Paroo Overflow in Western NSW is dry more often than not. The landscape is minimal, scattered perspectives, spinifex, saltbush, red sandy earth, nothing moves, there is beauty.
A scar, an ancient watercourse which is defined in some areas as white sand, quartz crystals, lighter than the red iron sand surrounding it, sits on the surface, blinding in the stark intensity of day. Occasionally a flat red rock on a vanishing edge of a pool, petroglyphs ancient and present.
A water tank, empty, it was always empty, now a decaying icon to the folly of trying to tame the desert.

Drawing is a way in which I can engage with the natural world. The immediacy of the mark making allows me to express, through line and material, the fragility and strength of what I see in nature, The delicate leaf clinging to the rugged gnarly branch provides the perfect metaphor for life. The ability to be vulnerable, yet resilient, connects me to the landscape in all of its wonders. 'Ornamental in Autumn', captures the moment of autumnal leaves barely clinging on as they flicker and dance in the thin Autumn light.

Embodied drawing is my door to 'no mind' – the core of my practice. This process of finding, rather than imposing, permeates my work. Through my engagement with digital and mechanical tools, into painting, each process passes through a filter of finding.
In this drawing I keep coming back to the negative space – the pregnant void of Robert Motherwell's 'open' series, the sense that the void is the work. Here void and line flutter between dominance. Calligraphy rehearses the gesture from a concrete intention; my process is the opposite – the gesture is the intention, from the body not the mind.