Du Rietz Art Award Winners
2025 Award Winners
Locals Award
Ian Gunn, ‘there is always beauty’
Acrylic and ink on polycotton, 122cm x 122cm
Judges' comments: This piece is an exploration of nature's quiet resilience. Created in response to the ugliness that has escalated since January 2025 the work serves as a visual reminder that darkness does not define the whole. Beauty remains persistent. Often overlooked but always present for those who are willing to see it. Through this piece, I invite viewers to pause, choose perspective and reconnect with the enduring grace that surrounds us.
Sponsored by SoMa SoMa Espresso Bar. $3,000
2D Acquisitive Award
Kellie O’Dempsey, ‘Bathroom Scene and Amber Glass Door (with wood panelling)’
Photographic installation, 155cm x 155cm
Judges' comments: Bathroom Scene and Amber Glass Door (with wood panelling) is a photographic installation that inhabits the liminal space between loss and grieving. In this work, the artist confuses care routines once performed in her fathers house, captured tenderly by photographer Jorge Serra a week before his passing. Blurring performance, ritual and documentation, the work honours the slow, repetitive labour of caregiving; often invisible and gendered. The amber light and intimate gestures, this work reflects on the fragility, the weight of memory and the quiet strength embedded in acts of care. It asks: what is the value of time spent tending to another.
Sponsored by Countrywide Metals Pty Ltd. $6,500
2D Highly Commended Award
Rosie Lloyd-Giblett, ‘Mistletoe and Honey’
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 152cm x 152cm
Judges' comments: This large abstract painting began in the field on a farm near Goondiwindi, QLD. I have been visiting this site regularly over the last two years, recording seasonal changes that are occurring through regenerative farming practices. Before starting this painting onsite, I walked, sketched and found a connection to a specific farm location. I sketched the initial visual impressions of the early summer rain and its impact on the buzzing floral landscape. I regularly changed my brushes, continually adding layers of luminous blue and green and tracing the Painted Honey Eater canopy dance.
Sponsored by CAA Consulting. $1,500
3D Acquisitive Award
Karen Lynch, ‘Recurve'
Basketry, 26cm x 24cm x 25cm
Judges' comments: Often unnoticed and underappreciated, beautiful natural materials are readily available in our everyday world. I have used the dried leaves of the ponytail palm (Beaucarnea recurvata), with their lovely organic colour, together with natural raffia, to weave a vessel from intricate and detailed motifs.
Sponsored by Budget Steel. $3,500
People's Choice Award
Sascha Tillsley, ‘Requiem'
Pigment on paper, 99cm x 133cm
Artist statement: Requiem is an ink pen drawing, line portraits of trees suggesting a moment suspended. Fragility and strength both hold place in this landscape. Remnant, fragment, trace- this is what is left of the once pristine forest, a corridor of lives lived and ancestral connections disrupted. An elegy of remembrance and longing. Stillness witnesses everything, all of time, all that has come to pass and all that is unfolding now. This work seeks to rejoice, through form and gesture, the abundant beauty of the living forest.
Sponsored by David and Sally Gartshore, Annette Reilly, Heinke Butt, and Drs Calin and Mihaela Negru-Radu. $1,000
2025 Judges
Special thanks to this year's judges Henri van Noordenburg, practicing artist and Project Officer at Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art; Lucy Quinn, glass artist and Manager of Programming and Engagement at Queensland Museum Rail Workshops; and Nina Shadford, Senior Curator at Caloundra Regional Gallery.