The winner of the fourth annual Chippendale New World Art Prize will be announced tomorrow night at the opening of the exhibition of the 41 finalists (thumbnails here). And I’m telling you this because the Emerging Artist is one of the finalists.
Her work, Open Hearts, is the first big day out for her Confined Hearts project (see Squarespace or facebook), in which she is working with a wide variety of people – from Rohingya asylum seekers to a retired children’s magazine editor – to make 1468 ceramic models of the human heart, one for each person in detention on Manus Island or Nauru. As she says, it’s an open question whether the hearts represent the detainees or us.
A small selection of the hearts was part of the recent Life Lines exhibition in the Chrissie Cotter Gallery in Camperdown, looking much better than in these snaps:
In the Chippendale outing, hundreds of the hearts lie in a hollow circle on the floor in front of a cyclone fence, wrapped in little muslin shrouds. Visitors are invited to step into the circle, unwrap a heart and place it in the centre of the circle, then place the white cloth in the fence. Writing a message on the cloth is optional – some of the hearts have been inscribed by their makers.
It was installed this morning. Here’s a sneak preview.
The exhibition is on until early July in Kensington Street, Chippendale.
Me fail? I fly! 