TASMANIAN artist Dr Julie Gough has won a Helen Lempriere Scholarship to create a piece for Sculpture by the Sea in Bondi, NSW.
The $30,000 scholarship will enable Julie to create the work in her Hobart West home and travel to Sydney to install it.
“The funding is very timely and hugely appreciated, enabling me to increase time spent overseas on two art projects this year,” she said.
“I will also be able to purchase workshop equipment and take a course.”
The first Indigenous artist to win a Helen Lempriere Scholarship, she draws on her family’s experiences as Tasmanian Aboriginal people in colonial times within her work.
“I was invited to exhibit about history, colonialism and cross-cultural conflict,” she said. “I work on a lot of installations,” she said.
The piece Julie has planned for Sculpture by the Sea is a combination of fur and wood.
“I am going to create a hot air balloon or parachute from eastern grey kangaroo skins with a woven Tasmanian dogwood basket,” she said.
“I want my work to look like I’ve landed from Tasmania in Bondi.”
The kangaroo skins will be sewn together in panels, with the basket woven in a wicker style from green dogwood branches as they are collected.
Julie started sculpting in 1993, but has expressed herself creatively from a young age.
“I was always a collector and made stories from what I collected using found objects and modifying them,” she said,
The day after Julie installs her work in Bondi she will jet off to America for an art residency at the University of Virginia.
Two other artists – Ron Robertson-Swann from Sydney and Harrie Fasher from Oberon, NSW – also won scholarships to pursue their artworks for the event.
- Sculpture by the Sea Bondi runs from October 19-November 5 – sculpturebythesea.com
