The Art Collection Writing Prize is an opportunity for UNSW students to explore works of art in the UNSW Art Collection and respond in a creative written form, to be in the running to win a prize of $1,000 and a UNSW Bookshop voucher.
This year, entrants were Invited to respond to three artworks on display as part of the Future in Focus exhibition:
Kate Mitchell’s humorous Taking out the Karmic Trash. Mitchell completed a Bachelor of Fine Art and a Master of Fine Art in 2008 at UNSW Art & Design. This work is part of a series which looks at magical thinking and New Age practices and their absorption by contemporary society.
Jasmine Poole is an Australian artist of Chinese background who completed a Bachelor of Fine Art with Distinction at UNSW in 2005. Inspired by Dutch still life painting, her photograph Memento Mori, Mate, replaces traditional symbols of the impermanence of existence with uniquely Australian items.
Michelle Teears’ Desert Rain was inspired by her 2019 trip to the remote Pilbara region in north-Western Australia and reflects her deep connection with nature. Teear is allergic to synthetically produced paints, and instead uses egg tempera and natural pigments for her works. Teear completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Art & Design 2005.
The winner of the prize was announced at the 2024 UNSW Culture Awards on Thursday 31 October, 2024 in the Sir John Clancy Auditorium. Congratulations to Munira Tabassum Ahmed for her work ‘The Overlaying’.
Munira Tabassum Ahmed is a writer and second-year medical student at UNSW. Her work has been published in Best of Australian Poems, Meanjin, Australian Poetry Journal, Liminal Magazine, Cordite, and elsewhere. She was the 2022 Kat Muscat Fellow and 2023-24 Faber Scholarship Recipient.
Adjudication statement:
Munira Tabassum Ahmed’s "The Overlaying" is a response to Michelle Teear’s Desert Rain 2. Teear’s painting is of the Pilbara in Western Australia, which the artist visited in 2019. The painting asks us to look through the rain at the colours and shapes of the landscape, which have in part been formed by previous downfalls; the Pilbara’s wildflowers, for instance, are dependent on the wet season which precedes their bloom. In a similar way, Ahmed’s poem is informed by the painting, and yet achieves its own success.
The form of the poem is important to its meaning. The first thing we notice is its visual appearance, which is quite beautiful in itself. We then encounter the first stanza as a prose poem, and the subsequent stanzas as minimal free verse. However, we soon realise that stanzas two, three, and four, are iterations of stanza one, and that each new iteration foregrounds different words – in this way, a fine lyric and environmental poem emerges, as from a rain cloud. This speaks to Teear’s painting and to the Pilbara, but also to nature and the seasons, and to the notion of maturation, or growing old.
“The Overlaying” is a poem about paying attention–it makes us pay attention to it – but it is also a poem about memory and persistence, and even hope. It is a sophisticated poem and a worthy winner of the 2024 Art Collection Writing Prize.
