Tasmanian artist Harrison Bowe has won the Hadley’s Art Prize People’s Choice Award for the second year in a row, earning $2,500 for a sunlit portrait of one of the state’s remote landscapes.
The People’s Choice Award was among the prizes announced as part of the Hadley’s Art Prize, run through Hobart’s Hadley’s Orient Hotel.
The main prize of $100,000 – one of Australia’s richest landscape art awards – was won by Robert Fielding, announced on July 31.
His winning work, Landscape, is a synthetic polymer on linen piece that challenges conventional ideas of what landscape means.
“We all talk about landscape – but what is landscape? Is it what we see or what we are?” Fielding said in his artist statement.
“For me, landscape is lived. It is memory. It is what has been taken, what has been lost, what has been found again.”
This year’s prize was judged by Abdul Abdullah, Judith Ryan and Sarah Wallace.
Bowe’s winning People’s Choice work, A Humbling Insignificance, depicts rocks in a remote part of Tasmania bathed in warm, golden light.
The Hobart-based artist completed his Bachelor of Fine Art at the University of Tasmania in 2020 and is known for venturing into the bush for weeks at a time, drawing directly on those experiences in his paintings.
The work is the sister piece to another Bowe painting that took out the Tattersall’s Landscape Art Prize earlier this year.
Curator Amy Jackett said the strength of public response had been clear throughout the exhibition.
“Many people spoke about how much they enjoyed seeing this painting,” she said.
“Visitors were drawn to that beautiful golden light and the feeling it creates.”
The exhibition continues this weekend, with artworks for sale and free entry from 10am to 4pm daily.
