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By Muk Muk Fine Art
July 20, 2012
Central Australian artist Margaret Loy Pula has won this year's Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize with her depiction of ‘Anatye” or Bush Potato.
Margaret is the first Indigenous artist to win this award and was chosen from 98 finalists.
"My story with bush potato, that's my father's dreaming, that's where I'm from”, Margaret said of her entry. “The women go out to collect them using crowbars to dig up the ground.”
“The potatoes are cooked in hot coals and are an important source of bush food for the Anmatyerre people”.
This is the 10th anniversary of the Waterhouse Art Prize and the award "highlights the artistic interpretations of our natural world by local, national and international artists."
Of the winning entry, the judges said: "The work makes you want to look into it and go on a journey with it.
"This work has a wonderful delicacy, almost fragility, but there's a strength in the colours coming through. Spectacular detail leads to a work reminiscent of natural shapes, such as spider webs or leaf patterns, with strength coming from cells joined together."
"The work is so detailed, it's a very fine painting, she's very conscious of painting slowly and getting a perfect painting," said Sharon Mitchell of Muk Muk Fine Art in Alice Springs, Margaret’s agent and representative.
This year’s prize attracted a record 840 entries from Australia and overseas. The art prize was established by the South Australian Museum in 2002 to honour its first curator, the eminent zoologist Frederick George Waterhouse.
The 2012 Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize will be on show at the SA Museum until September 9.
It will then tour to the National Archives of Australia in Canberra from September 21 to November 11.
Margaret is represented exclusively by Muk Muk Fine Art, her next exhibition will open in the Alice Springs gallery on September 6th.
