Fiona Lowry wins Sylvia Jones Award for Brisbane Portrait Prize

Fiona Lowry's Brisbane Portrait Prize entry Before the crossroads (Vin age 11) has been awarded the 2023 Sylvia Jones Award. 

 

The sitter is Fiona’s 11 year old son, Vincent, and was captured during a transitional period after their family’s recent move to Brisbane. She uses her trademark monochrome pallete and airbrush technique, imbuing the work with an ephemeral feeling of the complexities of transition, and future possibility.

‘The heat, the smell, the sound and even the architecture all feel so viscerally different. We are in a state of flux. 

 

It reminds me of poem by Swedish poet and psychologist, Tomas Transtromer called the Blue House, where he reflects on the choices we make in life – It is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real.’

 

- Fiona Lowry

 

'This is a stunning painting of the artists son at age eleven, created at a time when she and her family had relocated to Brisbane. Lowry captures a sense of displacement, disorientation and change in the physical atmosphere, and at the same time, reflects a much more personal dialogue about the anticipation and uncertainty in her son’s internal life.
 
There’s a subminimal suspense in the work, like a veil you can’t fully and clearly see, which suggests a lack of clarity or a state of in betweenness, so you have a sense of what’s happening, but at the same time, there’s a kind of adolescent disquiet.
 

It’s an incredibly tender work, which has a kind of ethereal feeling that is both comforting and questioning, evident in the way she’s captured his eyes – a disquietude or a foretelling of things to come.'

 

- Suzanne Cotter

Director, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
Chief Judge 2023

 

Artwork:

Fiona Lowry

Before the crossroads (Vin age 11), 2023

acrylic on canvas

70 x 90cm

26 Oct 2023