Fragile beauty: Janet Laurence takes home $35,000 art prize for ‘seductive’ photo of Antarctic moss

Sydney-based artist Janet Laurence has been awarded the country’s highest value art prize for women for an Antarctic photo that plays with scale and light.

Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize: Professional Artist Winner - Moss Water Ice Temperature Rising, by Janet Laurence.

Australia’s highest-value art prize for women has been awarded to a Sydney-based artist for a photographic work taken in Antarctica.

Janet Laurence is the winner of the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize’s most significant award, taking home $35,000 for her large-scale semi-transparent photograph of delicate Antarctic moss.

“I’m really excited that it’s work about these little sacred spaces in Antarctica,” Ms Laurence said.

Prize patron and judge Jade Oakley said the prize is significant not only due to its financial reward, but as “a recognition of artistic excellence”. Prizewinners this year were selected from 1934 entries, more than double the volume entered in the Archibald Prize.

“This prize offers many Australian women artists the opportunity to exhibit and sell their work, and for the winners of the three categories the prize offers recognition, publicity, and financial reward,” Ms Oakley said.

Presented alongside the major prize for professional artists is the emerging artist prize, awarded to Lilli Stromland for a vividly-coloured domestic still life, and an Indigenous emerging artist prize. The latter was awarded to South Australian artist Fiona Pompey for a painting judges appraised as “a veil of rhythmic pattern”.

Detail: Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize: Emerging Artist Winner - Ode to Peaches and Cleaning, by Lilli Stromland.

Ms Oakley said the Antarctic photograph was selected by judges after sunlight fell on the translucent work and “cast a lacework of shadows on the wall behind”.

“This artwork seduces us with beauty and poetic veils of translucent image, encouraging us to lean in close to examine a tiny, ancient forest of moss in Antarctica,” she said.

Antarctic moss grows in swathes of the continent’s ice-free landmass as ‘forests’, forming its main plant life and surviving under snow for months at a time.

“[Ms Laurence’s work is] engaging, disarming then suckerpunching us with the global environmental catastrophe of climate change”.

Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize: Indigenous Emerging Artist Winner - Tali Nguru, by Fiona Pompey.

The photographic work is printed on a large transparent sheet and has been painted over with an oil-based medium, granting the scene a sense of intimacy and fragility.

Titled Moss Water Ice Temperature Rising, Ms Laurence said the photo “has a sense of emergency about it”.

The artist created the work after embarking to Antarctica in 2022 on an arts fellowship to Casey Station, 3880km south of Perth.

She befriended a meteorologist on site and accompanied him on daily weather checks that inspired her work.

Sydney-based artist Janet Laurence has been awarded the country’s highest value art prize for women, the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize, for her photographic work taken in Antarctica titled Moss Water Ice Temperature Rising

“There was so much discussion among the scientists about ice and the melting glaciers, you’re observing it wherever you are,” she said.

“The temperatures are warming so much that there’s often not enough water for the moss forests to survive. They’re very, very fragile.”

The exhibition of 99 finalist artworks will be on display in Sydney’s north at Ravenswood School for Girls until July 6.