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South Australian artist Kate Bohunnis has won the $100,000 Ramsay art prize for her hypnotic and unnerving sculpture, Edges of Excess.
The biennial award, which is open to Australian-based artists under 40 working in any medium and run by Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), attracted 350 entries for its third outing, culminating in a crop of 24 finalists from around the country.
30-year-old Bohunnis’ winning entry, Edges of Excess, consists of a length of pink silicon draped, as if a long thick strip of bubblegum, between two polished metallic shapes suspended from the ceiling by chains. Overhead, a third piece – a stainless steel pendulum that’s part crutch, part scalpel – swings back and forth with metronomic regularity.
Bohunnis, whose work defies easy definition, said her shapes explore the permeability of once immutable notions of gender, bodies, objects and sexuality.
“It’s momentous,” Bohunnis said at the announcement ceremony in Adelaide on Friday morning.
“I feel very proud, and I feel very proud of everyone else in this room,” she said of her fellow finalists. “Cappuccinos on me.”
The prize judges were Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens, Daniel Mudie Cunningham, director of programs at Carriageworks, and Rebecca Evans, Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at AGSA.
AGSA director Rhana Devenport said on Friday: “The Ramsay art prize sets out to elevate and accelerate careers for young contemporary Australian artists. Currently unrepresented by a commercial Gallerist, Bohunnis is a rising star in the contemporary art scene, and this winning work represents an ambitious leap in her practice.”
Bohunnis said the shapes in her work explore “feeling” rather than clear-cut representations or narratives, with the pendulum grounded in her childhood experience of surrendering her own agency.
“My mum’s quite a spiritual woman, quite eccentric,” Bohunnis said. “We would use a pendulum as a tool for divination. It was about pathfinding, healing the body and centring ourselves. And that was very alluring for me, and very quickly we were overusing it, making decisions with it when we should have been leaning on other [kinds of agency]. It became risk-indulgent.
“The work is about that moment where I found myself not being able to make important decisions for myself – it’s a lesson I’m still learning. To not give over, to not be so attracted to something that seems magic.”
Edges of Excess is a work that is both mechanical and ambiguously flesh-like, as with every pass the blade comes within millimetres of cutting the giant ribbon but never meets its mark.
“The silicon for me represents the body, my body, anybody’s body,” Bohunnis said of the pink centrepiece (“It’s very soft, it’s very wobbly, it is almost like a tongue – a body without bones”). “It’s about that moment of almost malfunction. It shows the vulnerability, being laid across where this pendulum is, coming dangerously close. The axe blade at the bottom could slice you, but it’s still functioning as it is.
“You’re still safe, but with one little move it could all be done.”
In its disorienting use of artificial forms and organic, human-esque bodies, Bohunnis is in good company.
Perth-based finalist Nathan Beard’s faintly Seussian Limp-wristed Gesture (i) features silicone replicas of his own hands, poised in a disembodied echo of a traditional Thai flower dance, draped in orange garlands made from cut-up monks’ robes.
Canberra-based artist Ella Barclay’s Dense Bodies Systems of Unknown has the appearance of three steaming coloured pools, in which a tangle of wires float among aerial footage of the artist swimming laps.
For Agonistes, Tehran-born photographer Hoda Afshar used 3D scanning to create digital portraits of Australian whistleblowers, recognising the human faces who disrupt larger systems while echoing the surveillance aesthetic of facial recognition and body scanning technology.
Other finalists reckoned with the body and the past. Hayley Millar-Baker’s series I Will Survive exploring Country and memory through a series of composite images, that digitally insert multiple versions of herself onto familiar coastal and bushland scenes of her childhood and family history in a gothic palette. Adelaide-based painter Solomon Kammer’s bracing oil painting Perpetuity is a prostrate self-portrait that contrasts the bodily violations of abuse with the often invasive, disempowering experiences women often endure in the medical system.
Other finalists include Zaachariaha Fielding, who also performs in electronic music outfit Electric Fields, whose work A Question About Direction mediates the visual language of his childhood home in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands (also home to 2019 Ramsay art prize winner Vincent Namatjira) with his own experience.
Edges of Excess was originally commissioned by South Australian contemporary arts organisation ACE Open for its 2020 South Australian survey exhibition, If The Future Is To Be Worth Anything, and will now be exhibited at the Art Gallery of South Australia alongside all 24 finalists before joining the gallery’s permanent collection.
The Ramsay prize is named for South Australian philanthropists James and Diana Ramsay and is an acquisitive contemporary art prize presented by the Art Gallery of South Australia.