Tuppy Ngintja Goodwin has been awarded the Hadley’s art prize 2022. The prize, presented by Hadley’s Orient Hotel for ‘the best portrayal of the Australian landscape’, sees the winner receive $100,000. The senior Pitjantjatjara artist and director of Mimili Maku Arts is the first woman to win the prize since its inaugural award in 2017.
The award was announced in Hobart on Friday, when Goodwin’s work topped the 35 finalists to Australia’s most lucrative art prize. Judged by a panel of art specialists – including Waanyi multimedia artist Judy Watson, Art Gallery of New South Wales’s head curator of Australian art, Wayne Tunnicliffe, and Tasmanian Museum and the Art Gallery’s senior curator of art, Mary Knights – the prize is open to any adult Australian artist, at any stage in their career, working in two-dimensional media, with an emphasis placed on inviting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists to submit.
Goodwin’s winning painting, Antara, is about the Tjukurpa story – from the Antara region of north-west South Australia – of the witchetty grub: ‘It’s a very old storyline from a long time ago, and I was taught about it when I moved to Mimili as a young girl. Now I look after it and teach the children about it, the Antara story. There are lots of songs associated with this place, and I love to sing them when I paint, share them with my granddaughters and friends.’
The judges praised ‘an incredibly resolved work … The colour palette is fascinating – the colours push and pull across the painting. The work generates movement. You can imagine the artist singing; it’s almost like a performative work’.
‘There is a diversity of brushstrokes and mark-making in a distinctive, raw, and energetic way. This powerful painting is full of life.’ Speaking through an interpreter, Goodwin said she was ‘pleased to show the storyline that holds so much for her community’ and expressed her happiness at being able to ‘share the story with the whole of Australia’.
Goodman’s winning effort, alongside the entries by the rest of the finalists, is on exhibition at Hadley’s Orient hotel, Hobart through 21 August 2022.
