The 2026 Winners of the Mandorla Art Award

“This is a response to the text given from an Australian Aboriginal perspective. It registers the fall in this country as occurring with the arrival of the First Fleet. It depicts the impact of the arrival through a grid in colours of country containing over 600 figures (632 in the grid and 6 below) representing the deaths in custody since the Royal Commission. The lower portion reflects the prison scenario with victims depicted around an Aboriginal person in a cell reaching out for country. Across the bottom is the title of the painting as maybe found on a cell block wall.” 

“These two birds are having a disagreement. They disagree on what is true. But they will reconcile their viewpoints because soon they will begin their yearly migration, it’s a long journey and they will need each other. These little birds are Swift Parrots. Half the year they live in Tasmania where they raise their chicks, then they fly across the stormy seas of Bass Strait to Victoria, where they live for the remainder of the year. They are brave birds.” 

“My recent work has explored abstract landscape, especially of the Wheatbelt and this work began with wanting to capture an illuminated, green salt lake. However, when finished the painting was immediately seen as being ‘a watermelon’. It became hard not to see anything else. The symbol of the watermelon has become a world-wide symbol of Palestinian resistance and resilience, so the painting carries the burden and the charge of this meaning. I asked myself which reading of the painting is the truthful one? I realised a symbol allows more than one truth to be present and when one is fearful, it allows the truth to be both hidden and carried forward. The painting reminds us of two truths; our human desire for the sublime, and uncomfortably, our human shame at what we allow to happen to others.” 

“This tiny self-portrait uses scale to intensify the feeling of overwhelm following consumption of news and relentless media that works to divide more than inform – the frown, scale and human hand with which it was painted all evoke a desperate search for (and defence of) truth. The title, drawn from a line of poetry by T.S. Eliot, evokes the sensation of being both specimen and consumer – pinned, observed, and targeted – like an insect fixed to the wall of media hypnosis. Painting this work became an act of severance from short-form media engagement through the prolonged discipline of making. It is an invitation for the viewer to come close, to observe the detail, spend time with an image and draw their own conclusions, rather than being pulled into the endless drone of doom-scroll.” 

“The title, The truth is lacking, suggests that truth is difficult to see—obscured by competing systems or our own acts of hiding. But this work proposes something more: that truth may be located precisely in that lack, in the failure of our structures to deliver the certainty they promise. The sacred structures in decay offer no salvation, and yet, in their very failure, point toward something irreducible that functioning systems cannot. This work does not deliver truth as a product; it offers truth as an experience of dislocation. And in that dislocation—in that space where certainty fails and we are left with nothing but the question—something like faith becomes possible again. Not faith as belief in propositions, but faith as the courage to remain present in the absence of answers.”

“Truth for me is Light. The Light that binds us, that brings love into the world, the Light that chases away darkness and the Light that Jesus brought into the world. 

I’ve used the Moth and the Moon to symbolise the search for Truth, because a moth is attracted to light and uses the moon for navigation. The circle appears in much of my work and is often referenced as a moon image. For the wings of the Moth, I have used prismatic shapes with redacted light to consider how light might interact with the surface of the wings. I love to put geometry in my work to give the work a feeling of being built. The Blood Moon represents the Blood of Christ spilt bringing the Light of Love into the world which clothes our nakedness and cleanses us of shame and fear.”