The 56th Blake Prize for Religious Art

Board of Directors' Statements of Support

Rev Rod Pattenden

On having faith in a Prize for Religious Art?

I am supporting the Blake Prize because I believe in the crucial significance such a prize has in terms of both art and ideas in Australian culture. While most art prizes celebrate landscapes and famous faces, the Blake in contrast, sponsors a vision that is concerned with what is at the heart of an artist’s passion and belief, the motivation for their own personal horizon of hope.

More than a prize for stuffy ideas about religion, the Blake in its long and controversial history has uncovered new talent, new ideas, and new directions in arts practice and celebrated the role of the visual in exploring the kind of future our culture might create. The Blake Prize’s genius is its eclectic, quirky and innovative capacity for re thinking issues around spirituality, belief and passion.

In a time when terrorism, religious fundamentalism and racial conflict mark our daily lives, the Blake provides a dynamic incursion of tolerant hope into that horizon. A prize, an exhibition, a touring schedule, publications, conferences, discussions and the simple buzz that the Blake creates, help to create a capacity for true tolerance and open hearted living. The Blake gives us eyes to see what a culture might look like that seeks to embrace difference and understanding.  The Blake affirms the important contribution the arts make to our future in becoming an imaginative and creatively generous nation.

 

Dr Sue-Anne Wallace

Art Historian and Chief Executive Officer Fundraising Institute of Australia

I’ve long thought the Blake Prize was the under-valued prize in Australian art. It is arguably the most important prize in the context of Australian art history, reflecting the seminal influences that have shaped an Australia engagement with the local and international art worlds. The Blake Prize now has new vigour – an exhibition meeting international standards, a touring program, educational and public programs and a long-term partner in the National Art School, Sydney.

My involvement now as a director of the Blake Society seems a natural progression from writing about the Blake as an art critic in the 90s, to working with Rosemary Crumlin on a retrospective of the Blake in 2002? to celebrate its fifty years of artistic development.

Religion is a challenging concept for many contemporary artists. Yet is it both about belief and spirituality, parameters within which most artists work at one time or another of their artistic development.

The Blake Prize presents the kaleidoscope of this contemporary artistic exploration of beliefs and spirituality, at a time when we are challenged daily in our concepts of religion and society. 

Rev Dr Doug Purnell

Theologian and artist

I strongly value the place of the created image to focus the questions that shape the sort of society that we want to be.  I like it that the Blake is about 'being' rather than simply concerned with faces or land. The Blake allows artists to go beyond the surface realities of our world and to provoke new and hard thinking about the sort of nation we are and want to be.

I value the historic role that the Blake has had in encouraging Australian artists to be confident to move beyond depictions of the surface of life to explore the nature of mystery through the poetic use of paint and other media through contemporary art.

The Blake has provided that important space in which artists become the creators of life and community through shaping images that connect the religious imagination to lived contemporary experience. The Blake provides for a contemporary and relevant allusion to and naming of God and the divine in contemporary Australian society.

 

Doug Perkins

Investment Adviser (Bell Potter Securities Limited)

Given my lack of any strong religious beliefs, my involvement with the Blake came as a complete surprise to many of my close friends. I believe, however, that the Blake has evolved beyond being a prize to source art to adorn the walls of religious institutions and is now about celebrating, challenging and providing a commentary to our very existence.

The Blake has been part of the Sydney art scene for 58 years and over that time has been the launching pad for so many great Australian artists. The challenge for the Blake is to continue to attract new and established artists to share their visions, passion and beliefs of what it is to be human.

The Blake will invariably question as well as embrace a variety of beliefs, and given the passion with which many hold these beliefs it is assured of creating controversy. Through art we can explore our differences and at the same time appreciate the similarities that in turn can lead to greater understanding and tolerance. After all, the subject we are exploring often has no right or wrong answer but is merely an interpretation of one’s faith and beliefs.

With the world growing increasingly smaller and our own cultural identity open to so many desirable and undesirable elements, I believe the Blake’s contribution to our own society to now be more important than ever.

 

Marion Borgelt

Artist

The Blake Prize offers a unique forum for artists to express personal interpretations and approaches to the questions of spirituality and religion. Artists can draw on a wide range of techniques, genres and subject matter to deal with spirituality and religious belief in today’s world.

As world issues continue to evolve and change with new and ever-challenging social and environmental problems so does the identity of the self within such a context of flux. Artists reflect how the world is being viewed from many varied points of view. Some artists examine the big questions of where we are going, the future versus the present; some try to find the elements of stability within the flux by looking at religious belief systems, some artists study the wonders in the natural world, whilst others look at human relationships and how they form integral, social networks. All these issues can be worthy subject matter for a work of art submitted for the Blake Prize providing they address, on some level, the nature of spirituality, which in itself, is very open to interpretation.

Being an artist, I have always appreciated the Blake Prize as it provides a context where artists can be both challenged and challenging on the nature of religious belief systems and spiritual understanding. Such a basis for an art prize means that artists and audience alike are encouraged to use the imagination, think independently and creatively and engage in discourse.