M16 X Culture Collab - Main Prize
Surya Bajracharya
Margaret and Frazer Fair, 2025. Charcoal, 61 x 80 cm. Image Brenton McGeachie.
This charcoal portrait by Surya Bajracharya depicts his mother and uncle in their youth, based on a photograph he discovered in a shoebox. The original image had a haunting, cinematic atmosphere, evocative of Diane Arbus or David Lynch, that compelled him to draw it. What began as a straightforward representational drawing exercise gradually evolved into a personal meditation on memory, family, and the passage of time.
Bajracharya uses charcoal, a tonally dynamic, delicate and vulnerable medium to building the portrait through countless tiny, abstract gestures. The result is a life-like, photo-realistic rendering, yet the process itself became far more than an act of reproduction. As he worked, Bajracharya found himself in quiet dialogue with the photograph—contemplating its hidden layers and reflecting on the lives and experiences of the two young figures captured in time.
The act of drawing became a meditative process, one that bridged personal history and artistic inquiry. In shaping the likeness of his family members, he also traced the contours of aging, nostalgia, and the impermanence of memory.
This portrait stands as both homage and investigation—an attempt to hold still a fleeting moment, and to explore how the past lives on through art, memory, and the quiet labour of close observation.
Highly Commended
Rmsina Daniel
Processional Way, 2025. Mild steel and micaceous iron oxide enamel, dimensions Variable. Detail image Brenton McGeachie.
Rmsina Daniel is an artist concerned with figuration and the human form. Daniel was always interested in the human condition as she firmly believed that the human is the central figure of this world. Daniel is a sculptor capable of working with a different range of materials. Her practice begins with drawing from a coffee cup seeking figures, then further extended through sculpture. Daniel has been working continuously with steel for 6 years. Her residency at the Sydney Olympic Park Armory allowed her to further her skills in welding. Usually, the environment and the site form the scale of her sculptures. Most of Daniel’s works are abstract relief sculptures and involve installation and composition that reveals a certain truth.
First Nations Artist Award
Natalie Bateman
South Arm Tasmania, 2025. Watercolours posca pens acrylic on Hahnemühle paper, 80 x 106 cm. Image Brenton McGeachie
I get all sorts of ideas from everyday living, most of these ideas come from the land, the incredible colour, shapes & patterns in everything around, the smells, sounds, & the stories passed down from my elders. With the love from my family, sharing of knowledge, respecting our cultural ways, being part of our family kinship, all this beauty gets put into my paintings as some sort of story. Using line work is our Yuin cultural way, I enjoy playing with colour and using them in a way that uplifts people.
Local artist award - Kyeema Gallery Award
Robbie Karmel
Headbowls, 2024-ongoing. Coloured pencil, graphite, charcoal and gum arabic on victorian ash, 43 x 75 x 32 cm. Single channel video, colour; 00:10:32
Headbowls is an ongoing project in which Robbie Karmel has made a series of turned segmented wooden bowls designed to be worn on the head and drawn on, printed from, modified, damaged, repaired, performed and reperformed. As participatory and performative objects the bowls are worn and drawn on collectively by the artist and audience.
The Headbowls provide a meditative space to observe, consider, and respond to perceptual experience—the shape and senses of the body, the weight of the bowl, interactions with others, and the tangled activity of drawing.
This iteration of the work presents two headbowls fused at the temple, creating an object that requires a second person to activate or play with. The work aims to embody a request for assistance, to share the weight of the object, and to collaborate in drawing and playing. Conversely, the Headbowls in this configuration are insular and myopic, a closed and potentially competitive or antagonistic engagement, reinforced by the videogame iconography that informs the helmet-ness of the Headbowls.
These objects are an invitation for social production of drawings that are ambiguous in their subject, object, author, and viewer. The collective Headbowl performative drawing invites people to access their tacit embodied knowledge and capacity for mark making and to collectively develop and share that understanding through the activity. These are objects that are played with, drawn on, broken, fixed, modified, pulled apart and put together again, and have no clear state of completion.
Viewers are invited to wear and draw on the Headbowls.
Local Artist Award - Megalo Print Studio
Kate Stevens
The Tunnel/Heart of Darkness, 2024. Coloured pencil on paper, 197 x 150 cm
This large pencil drawing is of the entrance to an earth tunnel in the village of Darwan, Afghanistan, from an image taken by Australian SAS soldiers during twenty years of War in Afghanistan. have returned the image to a scale around life-sized, looking for traces of its history: place as witness. The choice of coloured pencil as material is a deliberate decision to insert the perspective of children back into narratives of war.