CATHERINE O’DONNELL Winner of the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award

September 22, 2024

Catherine O’Donnell has been announced as the winner of the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award (JADA) 2022 at Grafton Regional gallery! Commencing in 1988, the biennial art prize is one of Australia’s most prestigious regional drawing awards and seeks to promote innovation and excellence in the practice with 56 artists selected from 641 entries. The winner was selected by the 2022 JADA judge Suzanne Cotter, Director of the MCA.

Catherine’s winning work ‘Glenbrook Window #1’ depicts the “suburban aesthetic which shapes and informs our everyday lives” by focussing on an ordinary window cropped to its dressings. The artist aims to extract the sense of humanity that emanates from lived-in spaces by reinterpreting and reinvigorating inhabited environments. This is seen in the work’s drawn lace curtain that signifies the opening between reality and illusion and becomes “an invitation to view the mundane with fresh eyes.”

The JADA exhibition also includes finalist Emma Fielden’s performance video ‘Andromeda and the Milky Lane’ and commended finalist Locust Jones’ animation stills ‘isolation is bad for business’. The show will tour Australia’s East coast throughout 2023 and 2024.

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Image caption: Catherine O’Donnell, 2021, ‘Glenbrook Window #1’, charcoal on paper, 75 x 46 cm, unframed