Lauren O’Connor was awarded first prize in the Visual Arts in the Valley, Tony White Memorial Art Prize, an art prize open nationally for young emerging artists in memory of the acclaimed jewellery designer, Tony White, as part of the October long-weekend visual arts festival.
“I am thrilled to be the winner Tony White Memorial Prize, what an honour. I heard it was quite competitive this year and the sheer number of entries has me very excited for the future of this prize. My hometown of Kangaroo Valley has had a difficult few year with fires, floods, Covid-19 isolation and road closures. I think an arts and culture festival is the perfect antidote!”
She has been a finalist in the Mosman Art Prize 2022 and Paddington Art Prize 2021, and is now the winner of the Visual Arts in the Valley, Tony White Memorial Art Prize.
Her recent solo show, ‘Eating Wild Honey’, at Arthouse Gallery in Rushcutters’s Bay explored themes of cultivation, expansion, movement and change within the natural landscape.
O’Connor grew up in Kangar’o Valley and remains close to the community. She chose to submit the work ‘Yarrunga” into Visual Arts in the Valley because it referenced an area of the Shoalhaven River and Tallowa Dam catchment that were harshly affected by the Currowan Bushfire in 2020.
Over the past three years she visited the site regularly and observed/drew/painted the changes she saw. She is currently in South Australia completing a placement at the Ernabella Arts Centre in Pukatja APY Lands working with Anangu Indigenous Artists.
Lauren O’Connor (b. Bowral 1994) is represented by Arthouse Gallery, Rushcutters’s Bay,and is a recent graduate from the National Art School, Darlinghurst.
Her practice includes painting and ceramics, and she is interested in abstraction, layering and the natural environment. Forms in nature are broken apart and reformed in her paintings giving new interpretations of landscapes. Based on memory and imagination, her landscapes lead to new worlds being created; familiar yet foreign, complicated yet simple. Her work constantly contradicts what the viewer’s eye is used to seeing and understanding about painting and landscape itself, mirroring the Australian landscape, with its contradictions of familiar and strange.
Natalie Harker for Arts in the Valley