Six Otago-based artists are in the running for New Zealand’s top contemporary art award, including recent graduate Craig Freeborn. Rebecca Fox looks at the Wallace Art Award finalists.
Not even a year out of Otago Polytechnic's School of Art and Craig Freeborn's name is on the finalist list of the Wallace Art Awards.
''I'm pretty happy. You never know what will happen with these sorts of competitions,'' he said from his Dunedin studio.
Freeborn, alongside Dunedin painters D. Milton Browne and Christopher Flavell, photographers Scotto Clarke, of Dunedin, and Brent Hollow, of Cromwell, and painter Marc Blake, of Queenstown, are among 88 finalists selected from 371 entries for the award, which has prize packages of more than $195,000.
Sir James Wallace established the Annual Wallace Art Awards 24 years ago to support and promote contemporary art and they are the longest-surviving and largest annual art awards of their kind in New Zealand.
The four winners receive valuable residencies at prestigious institutions in the United States and Switzerland.
The finalists have been selected by a judging panel comprising prominent members of the arts sector Andrew Clifford, Georgina Ralston, Philip Trusttum, Richard Maloy and Sam Mitchell.
All finalists' works go to the Pah Homestead, TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, where round two of judging will commence before the winners are announced on September 5.
Freeborn, who completed his visual arts degree at Otago Polytechnic last year having gone back to study after a seven-year break, chose the work he entered in the awards because it was topical. Lovelock Oak features the oak planted at Timaru Boys' High School to honour Jack Lovelock.
''It was handy timing, what with the Olympics. It is a play on the relationship between us and sport.''
He was lucky enough to finish his art and go straight into business making frames and canvases, which allowed him time to paint, he said.
''It keeps me busy most of the time.''
Being a finalist alongside some top contemporary artists was special, as was it being the Wallace Awards, given Sir James' generous support for the awards, he said.
Otago Polytechnic art school undergraduate programmes programme manager Mark Bollard said it was a tremendous achievement for a recently graduated student.
Freeborn had been an unusual student, as he came to the school with his practice already partly formed.
''He polished and developed his existing practice.''
Photographer Scotto Clarke was ''gobsmacked'' when he learnt of his finalist placing.
Last year, he had his first exhibition in more than 40 years as he sought to re-establish himself as an artist.
He chose to enter a work featuring his 92-year-old mother, a ballerina and choreographer, in a piece he hoped would make people think twice about judging ''a book by its cover''.
•Two photographers, Otago Polytechnic senior lecturer in photography Mark Bollard and former Otago Polytechnic art student (2013) Justin Spiers have made the finals of the National Contemporary Art Award managed by Waikato Museum.
It is judged by international curator Misal Adnan Yildiz and the winners will be announced tomorrow.
•Otago Polytechnic photography lecturer Rachel H. Allan is a finalist in the international Renaissance Photography Prize, to be held at the Getty Images Gallery in London. The awards will be presented on September 7.
•Polytechnic senior lecturer in sculpture Scott Eady won the inaugural Martin Tate Wallace Artist Residency in Vladivostok, Russia, in June.
