Thea Anamara Perkins' painting Return is included in the Tesltra NATSIA Award finalists exhibition.
72 finalists have been announced in this year’s 2024 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards Telstra (NATSIAA). The Telstra NATSIAA is Australia’s longest running and most prestigious art award of its kind, presented on Larrakia Country (Darwin) by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) and Principal Partner, Telstra.
Thea Anamara Perkins is a finalist in the prize with her painting Return.
‘Return is inspired by a slide of my family on the road to Mparntwe (Alice Springs) in the seventies, bogged after rain.
This work takes a small jewel-like record and in the process of enlarging extrudes and amplifies its essence. Playing with the icons of red centre sands, the road stretching as far as the eye can see and the Holden Kingswood. In this work I was particularly interested in the contrast of detail and rhythm. There is a sense of the distilled eternal. A moment of being for the central figures. It is a departure in bringing together my landscape and portraiture practice, as well as a consolidation of what I learned during an international residency last year.
It speaks to maintaining connection within the shifting sands of history. There is something integral to First Nations experience in the sometimes epic journey to return to country; but also a shared universal experience of going home.'
Awards Ceremony Friday 9 August
Artwork:
Thea Anamara Perkins
Return, 2024
acrylic on clayboard
90 x 120 cm
