It’s all relative as La Prairie Art Award judges put Perkins family first

Thea Anamara Perkins on Tuesday was named winner of the $80,000 La Prairie Art Award, a prize for Australian women artists.

La Prairie Art Award winner Thea Anamara Perkins in Sydney. Picture: Getty Images

Thea Anamara Perkins uses the term glimmer to describe the quality of tenderness, love and ­belonging that she finds in family photographs of birthday parties, days at the beach and moments of togetherness.

Glimmer, a term used in psychology as the opposite of “trigger”, is also the quality that Perkins seeks to evoke in her acrylic paintings, which are often based on family snapshots.

Perkins, 31, on Tuesday was named winner of the $80,000 La Prairie Art Award, a prize for Australian women artists presented by Swiss cosmetics company La Prairie and the Art Gallery of NSW.

Four of Perkins’s paintings, ­acquired by the AGNSW, depict three generations of her family, including her grandfather, ­pioneering Aboriginal activist Charles Perkins; her mother, art curator Hetti Perkins; and her aunt, filmmaker Rachel Perkins.

A fourth image shows Perkins’s sister Madeleine as she waits to blow out the candles on her birthday cake.

“I seek to express glimmers and moments of tenderness,” Perkins said. “I think it’s still in the vein of activism, but doing it with gentleness. I selected these ­images because I like to talk about my own experience within my family, and speak to something universal.”

Perkins said she chose to paint images of her loving family as a way of countering some negative depictions of First Nations families. “I grew up seeing a lot of ­misrepresentation and misinformation, in the sense of negative portrayals,” she said.

“I thought it would be a powerful way to contradict those, and to express what I know – that we are loving and strong, and that nurturing is a part of our broader community’s continual strength and survival.”

It is the second year of the La Prairie Art Award; last year it was won by Melbourne photographic artist Atong Atem. The award comprises $50,000 for the gallery’s acquisition of the artworks and $30,000 for an artist ­residency in Switzerland.

AGNSW senior curator of Australian contemporary art Isobel Parker Philip said Perkins had a unique way of capturing in paint the emotive quality of photographs. Perkins said the paintings were part of a larger series called Lhere, meaning river in Arrernte, and suggesting the strong current of a family across generations.

The paintings will be shown in The National, a biennial survey of contemporary Australian art, opening on March 24.

“Glimmer is the opposite of trigger, and speaks to moments of connection, safety and belonging,” Perkins said.

“It was a unifying principle in the photos in my family archives, and it’s something I sought to ­express in painting them.”