KEY POINTS:
Dunedin artist James Robinson is off to New York for a six-month residency and with $35,000 in the bank after winning the Paramount prize in the Annual Wallace Art Awards at the Aotea Centre last night.
Robinson, 35, who is on a six-month residency at McCahon House in French Bay, Titirangi, won the award for Taniwha/Dragon, a mixed media work on sewn paper and canvas. The awards were presented by the Governor-General Anand Satyanand.
Lianne Edwards, of Nelson, won the $15,000 development award, which comes with a three-month residency with the Vermont Studio Centre in the United States, for her work, 4d Piwakawaka: 1d Health, made from 1965 4d used health stamps.
Two runner-up awards of $1500 each went to Kirsten Roberts, ofAuckland, for an untitled pink oil painting, and Andrea Du Chatenier, of Whangarei, for Love Sanctuary, made of hand-dyed wool.
The jury prize - awarded by judges Peter Gibson-Smith, who was the 2001 Paramount prize winner, art writer Warwick Brown, Unitec lecturer Richard Fahey, 2006 Paramount winner Rohan Wealleans, and Art Research Centre director Linda Tyler - was awarded to Megan Jenkins, of Auckland, for a digital print, Atmospheric Optics V.
The Wallace Art Awards, set up by Auckland arts benefactor James Wallace, are in their 16th year, and are the longest running awards of their kind in Australasia. All the finalists' works are held by the Wallace Charitable Trust. The collection will go on loan to institutions such as universities and hospitals and an exhibition of this year's winners and selected finalists is on show at the Aotea Centre until October 1, before appearing at the New Dowse Gallery in Lower Hutt.
