We have just been notified that we have won the Poimena Art Prize at Launceston Church Grammar and they have acquired our ‘Rear 477 Dean Street Albury’ m2. See the m2 website here

POIMENA ART AWARD

From June 29, 2007 to July 23, 2007

The winner of the $5000 Poimena Art Award for 2007 is a collaboration between Patrick Ronald and Shannon McDonell for their a large photographic print entitled M2 – Bathroom 1.

The Poimena Art Award is a biennial acquisitive prize for mixed media work. It has been running since 2003. Any artist working in Australia or overseas can enter. Artists are required to respond to a particular theme. In 2007 this is the notion of ‘Shine’. This theme conjures uplifting thoughts of light and joy as well as the notion that ‘all that glistens is not gold’. The theme therefore, is open to an endless range of creative possibilities which is what this award is all about.

The judges Kristin Headlam and Raymond Arnold described the work as:

“A clever response to the theme of the award – ‘Shine’. It is ostensibly about glistening bathroom surfaces but as you look further the shine has been burnished off by life embedded in the detritus and dust.

The work is contradictory. After the initial double take, the viewer is overwhelmed by the sheer formal beauty of it. There is a refined sense of arrangement, colour, form and pattern which is the framework for human experience.

Truth, reality and representation are held in tension – a highly constructed artifact which expresses the artists’ ideas about the dignity of the every day. They have created beauty out of the every day, achieving a dignity and an austere purity.”