Kate Dorrough has been announced as a finalist in two major art prizes - The Clunes Ceramic Award and the Calleen Art Award.
The Calleen Art Award is an annual acquisitive painting prize and exhibition. It presents the best of contemporary Australian painting in any style, theme or subject. Dorrough was selected for this prize for her painting Sonnet to the Moon and the Three Rivers.
Of this work Dorrough states - This abstracted essence of a landscape and its three rivers culminates in an intuitive and painterly calligraphic mark making in combination with the materiality of up cycled textiles, canvas, stitching and paint. Evoking the poetic quality of the land in moonlight, it speaks of the essentiality of local rivers and creeks in the Cowra district. The rivers which traverse the land carry an inferred calligraphic language which acknowledges the need to decipher, understand and care for our rivers, in order to work with and preserve river rights and their potential for abundant offerings of fertility.
Her ceramic piece Archaic Vessel was selected for The Clunes Ceramic Award, an initiative of Creative Clunes Inc. and is in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ballarat and the Castlemaine Art Museum.
This hand built stoneware vessel is an alchemic synthesis of glaze and clay. The vessel echoing forms of antiquity, is a container to hold and contain. The work speaks of the river, a source of fertility and renewal. A symbolic and abstracted essence of the river, its surface invokes the calligraphic mark. With a layering of multiple glazes and numerous firings it becomes a fusion of the painterly mark with the ceramic form. Iron oxide with the clay body is fused within a painterly approach to glaze application revealing the passage of time. A palimpsest of obscured and inscribed markings suggests a text or language to be understood or deciphered. Acknowledging the need to understand the river in order to preserve and work with this vital, cyclical and elemental force life force. — Kate Dorrough
Don't miss seeing these works in these incredible exhibitions at the below institutions.
Calleen Art Award is on at Cowra Art Gallery until 18 October 2026
The Clunes Ceramic Award will be on display at Esmond Gallery, Upstairs at The Warehouse, Clunes until November 1 2026
