Nicholas Blowers wins the 2024 Glover Prize
The annual $75,000 acquisitive Glover Prize is awarded to the artwork judged the best contemporary landscape painting of Tasmania with the term “landscape painting” defined in its broadest sense. The aim is to stimulate an interchange of ideas about the meaning and possibilities expressed in the words landscape, painting, and Tasmania.
Last month, Hobart-based artist Nicholas Blowers was announced as the overall 2024 winner for his work titled Lake Bed, and Raymond Arnold and Georgia Hill were Highly Commended for their individual works, respectively titled Death and the Past came up the Well-known Road and Wynyard.
Judge Mary Mulcahy, alongside judges Ralph Hobbs and Malcolm Bywaters, addressed the winning and highly commended works, discussing their ability to start conversations:
“The winning work and the highly commended works this year took us on a journey of connection with the Tasmanian landscape. They went beyond being technically proficient or realistic renditions of landscapes and created connections to the landscape and, through their work, a connection to us. They made us question what is landscape? And why landscape painting? They challenged us and made us question our assumptions, our beliefs, and most importantly our connection to the landscape. It was not always comfortable.
All the works have very personal connections, but the winning work also brings us face to face with the destruction resulting from human actions in and on the landscape. Human intervention that for better or worse have become synonymous with Tasmania. It depicts a landscape that has been traumatised by logging and flooding and then uncovered by nature through drought to remind us starkly that there are consequences for our actions. Described by the artist as similar to WWI battlefields we have to ask are humans at war with the landscape? The work also challenges our assumptions about composition and colour – surely something so stark would be
