Liam cutting his hair after an all-nighter by Siân Stephens. Photo / Supplied
Liam cutting his hair after an all-nighter by Siân Stephens. Photo / Supplied
A Wellington artist is overjoyed to have won the 10th Parkin Drawing Prize, saying it will allow her to give back to the art community the way she has always wanted to.
Siân Stephen has won the prestigious award for her work entitled Liam cutting his hair after an all-nighter. The 26-year-old told the Herald the work was inspired by an intense emotional reaction she had to her partner's ritual of cutting his own hair while the pair was in Covid-19 isolation.
Liam decided to stay up all night creating music, and fueled by coffee and no sleep, woke his partner to tell her he was cutting his hair.
"I'm the kind of person who can't handle change at all," Stephens says.
"So he got the scissors and in this beautiful sunrise light started lopping his hair off. I started photographing, I'm not a photographer at all but I knew I had to make something from this moment."
Stephens has won a $25,000 prize, with which she intends to help pay for Liam to come with her back to her home country of Wales – but she will also use it to give back to the community.
"It'll be nice to have an experience as an artist in my adult life and not be super stressed about money for a bit which will be so delicious ... I'm surrounded by lots of wonderfully talented and creative people and for the first time in my life I'll be able to support their work."
Head judge Felicity Milburn told the Herald Stephen's work spoke to her.
"It was one that I kept having to come back to have another look. It wasn't a work that revealed itself immediately, it was one that raised a lot of questions and I kept wanting to go back to it to find out more."
Milburn says Stephen's choice to keep Liam's face obscured was an interesting one.
"They're looking into the mirror so you should be able to see the reflection but they're the only ones who can see, and they're in the middle of a really dramatic moment. I was fascinated by the setup of that, and I was just really compelled by the way the artist had managed to make a really complicated composition feel really alive and interesting."
The Parkin Drawing award was the creation of Wellington philanthropist Chris Parkin, who told the Herald he thought one of the things missing from the New Zealand art world was a "reasonably substantial drawing award".
"I decided one of the contributions I could introduce to the art world which would have some enduring potential."
He says as well as the $25,000 prize, winning works are also "acquisitive prizes".
"So basically, I get them," he told the Herald through laughter.
"Some of them are on display – most of our collection is down at the QT Hotel on Cable St, but some are for one reason or another, sometimes unpracticable to display we have them in storage and sometimes other people borrow them."
Although he adds the winners to his collection, Parkin has no say at all in which works win the prize – and he ensures the judges are different each year.
"I've never been tempted to judge it myself - I don't always agree with the judges and that's probably a good thing – what I would choose and what the judges choose is almost always different, which gives it more artistic credibility, and by changing the judges every year it ensures we never get in a rut.
I don't want artists thinking, 'oh I won't enter the Parkin because I know what sort of thing wins it, and that's not what I do'."
The Parkin Drawing Exhibition will run until September 11 at the New Zealand Fine Arts Academy, Queens Wharf in Wellington.
All artworks will be for sale and for the first time, all past winners of the Parkin Prize will be displayed among this year's winner and finalists, to mark the award's 10th anniversary.
