ArtBeat
Presented by The Zonta Club of Ashburton over the past eight years in partnership with the Ashburton Art Gallery, the Zonta Ashburton Female Art Awards award continues to raise the status of female visual artists in the wider Canterbury area, acknowledging “emerging and mid-career female artists as well as providing a platform for female youth”.
In 2024, the Premier Award was won by Marie Porter for The Rocks, a work that also assumed the guise of an installation, it is described as bringing together “found rocks from Horomaka Banks Peninsula with handmade rocks cast from bronze, clay, papier-mâché, and more, to create a collection that Porter encourages viewers to touch. An accompanying notebook that visitors are also invited to handle contains poetry and sketches. Withstanding turmoil through tectonic shifts and eruptions over millennia, Marie sees rocks as foundational and constant, and as a metaphor for community in their beauty and collective resilience, calling them “the DNA of our natural world.”
The three invited judges for 2024 were senior practicing artists: Paerau Corneal, senior Lecturer in Fine Arts at Elam Te Waka Tūhura, Ruth Watson, and Curator of Art, Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago, Hope Wilson. Speaking on behalf of all three judges, Watson commented that amongst the finalists’ works there was “excellence in execution across the board, as well as some experimental ideas and approaches. She described Marie’s winning work “as an act of ‘highly pleasurable material experimentation’, and expressed her delight in seeing visitors interact with the work”. Porter received an award of $4,000 and the opportunity to create a solo exhibition at the Ashburton Art Gallery and Museum in 2025.
The ZAFAA24 Young Generation Award went to Jenny Wang for her sculpture Flicker, her work described as “materially ambitious and intriguingly resonant, addressing heritage both physical and cultural”.
DETAILS: Zonta Ashburton Female Art Awards 2024
Ashburton Art Gallery, 327 West Street
2nd March – 4 April
IMAGE: Marie Porter, The Rocks, 2023, rock, glass, aluminium, bronze, corn starch, plastic, totara, cardboard, papier-mâché and modelling clay.