fortyfivedownstairs has been presenting the annual Emerging Artist Award since 2015 and each year it’s refreshing to see a new cohort of diverse artistic talent tapping into various topics of exploration.
For 2024, 30 artists are showcasing their practices inside the expansive underground space of fortyfivedownstairs. Through careful curation, each of the finalists’ works receives the attention and dignity that it deserves.
Holly Block’s eerie and captivating two-metre installation, Once such a pretty girl, they would say, whatever have you become?, shares a space with the stop-motion film projection of Lucy Crowe, titled i think that i think too much. The works speak to each other in their surreal aesthetic and shared anxieties. Block’s dolls bury their heads into the ground with the backdrop of red velvet curtains, seemingly engaged in some sort of forced ritual. Meanwhile, Crowe constructs fragments of unease through dark tones and raw lines.
A fair number of paintings have made the selection; highlights include Michael Kemp’s foreboding oil paintings of surveillance imagery, Cam Summers’ sensuous Down, With Me (created in acrylic, charcoal, ink and pastel) and Martin Claydon’s Heaven in Disorder, humming with chaotic energy.
Melanie Sky reclaims discarded canvas in a reflection of lived experiences and memories from bushfires, with surfaces and colours that almost resemble burned skin. Materiality is also explored in (can’t see the forest) for the trees…, an installation by Jessica Row. Bark of the London plane tree is cast into ceramics and embossed onto tannin-dyed paper, creating an urgently needed sense of preciousness around the disappearing species.
Familial history is tenderly observed in Kat Rae’s Vim and Vigour, featuring a portrait of her late husband as a child and a destroyed Army squadron flag. Rae recently won the 2024 Napier Waller Art Prize and uses her practice as a way to untangle the pain and trauma brought about by the military-industrial complex.
Passing Through and Along by Leila Frijat blends video and cyanotypes with a mother-daughter conversation, a sacred moment that forgoes the need for translation.
On the more lighthearted side, find Nani Puspasari’s delightful ceramic shortcake with a character lounging among the berries, and Pilar de la Torre’s collection of kewpie dolls that remind the artist of her granddaughter.
Nadine Schmoll’s circular installation, made using waste plastic, is a centrepiece that ties the exhibition together, appearing at once intricate and rigid while bringing to mind ocean lifeforms.
Read: Exhibition review: Together Again: Clara Adolphs, Ngununggula
There are many more artists and artworks that could’ve been mentioned in this review. Overall, the Emerging Artist Award is laudable in not only its quality of selected works, but also its generosity in making a well-deserved space for promising early-career talent, regardless of age or background.
Finalists’ works in the Emerging Artist Award 2024 are on view at fortyfivedownstairs from 16-26 July; free.
