All the emotions are documented in the best photos of 2020

At first glance, it looks like a body dismembered: a torso in two parts, an arm here, hair floating there, separate to the figure. Deepening cracks loom ominously in the foreground; there’s a sense of desolation. Is the person pictured sleeping or are we witnessing something more sinister?

Lillian O’Neil’s Drawing to a close, 2020, works as a metaphor for the very strange year that was and has won the prestigious Bowness Prize, one of Australia’s richest photographic art awards.

Lillian O’Neil’s Drawing to a close 2020, detail featured, pigment ink-jet prints, 183.0 x 183.0 cm, winner of the Bowness Prize 2021. Credit:Courtesy of the artist and The Commercial (Sydney)

The 36-year-old Bellarine-based artist created the work when she was eight months pregnant, at the height of last year’s pandemic lockdowns. It is part of a suite of collages that showed at The Commercial Gallery in Sydney last year, made using photographs found in old books; sleep is a recurring theme. “There was this sense of a sleeping beauty myth, like the whole town had just gone into suspended animation.”

This year’s Bowness Prize judges were artist Del Kathryn Barton, Karen Quinlan, director of the National Portrait Gallery, and Anouska Phizacklea, director of Monash Gallery of Art (MGA). They narrowed down the field of 1700 entrants to a shortlist of 52, all of which are on show at the gallery.

The William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize is designed to promote excellence in photography and is run through the MGA Foundation. Past winners include Tamara Dean, Polixeni Papapetrou, Petrina Hicks and Ray Cook.

Lauren Bamford’s Easter egg hunt and Dot’s apple 2021, pigment ink-jet prints, 30.0 x 25.0 cm, won the Colour Factory Honourable Mention in the 2021 Bowness Prize.Credit:Courtesy of the artist

The slightly disturbing Easter egg hunt and Dot’s apple, 2021, by Lauren Bamford; Shea Kirk’s Dina Scintilla, 2020; and Ali Tahayori’s Sisterhood, 2021, each won honourable mentions this year.

According to Phizacklea, what didn’t appear in the images was revealing. “It was the absence of the most pressing issue that was present in its absence. While in previous years the political or social issues of the day influenced the subject matter, COVID as a topic was not overt but its impact on artists’ practice was something that bound so many works. Artists often looked inwards, whether to a domestic and interior life to works that marked a change in practice, focus or technique.”

O’Neil loves that her winning image can be read in different ways - even as a dismembered body. “That’s what happens when you find all these images from all over the place with multiple different subjects and try to bring them together in a new scenario, they are ambiguous,” she says.

Ali Tahayori’s Sisterhood  2021, pigment ink-jet print, 120.0 x 120.0 cm, received a Colour Factory Honourable Mention in the 2021 Bowness Prize.Credit:Courtesy of the artist

Although her father is a photographer, she has never taken her own shots. She has always collected pictures and her collection of books from about 1950 to 2000 now numbers in the thousands. “They’re a lot of how-to book or encyclopedias or that style, or photography annuals, books on ballet or swimming technique or natural disasters, a huge range of topics. I guess they are all books that have been made obsolete by the internet.”

Finalists include Shea Kirk with Dina Scintilla (left and right view)  2021, from the series Vantages, pigment ink-jet prints, 135.0 x 108.0 cm (each). Credit:Courtesy of the artist

“They are cultural artefacts of the last century that I find quite precious. It’s an important time to be collecting analogue material; there’s this amazing record of analogue photography in them.”

She sees them as the antithesis of our experience of online images, “maybe even an antidote”.

“The randomness is a big part of it, the clash of topics as you’re going through them, laying out hundreds of images on the floor, these strange new relationships between images become apparent,” she says.

Lillian O’Neil, photographic collage artist, in her studio, surrounded by hundreds of photos.Credit:Rose O’Neil

She won’t necessarily have an end picture in mind when she starts to make a piece and it often takes months to make one work. “It’s just one image next to another and waiting for that moment where it feels like they belong together. And then adding more images and taking away and adding and taking away ... and really puzzling because it all has to work as a new scene. You’re working with all these different places and times and styles of photography and printing methods.”

It sounds like it requires a lot of patience but O’Neil says she gets in a zone. “You sort of live in these images, it’s definitely a bit obsessive, you disappear into them.”

For her, the creation of a work is the entire process, the collecting and finding the fragments within photographs. “The way the light passes through a window or the way a hand is gesturing, just these tiny little bits in the photos... There’s repetitions, patterns and styles of photography, the gestures the bodies are making within those photos. There’s a real recognition in a lot of the patterns of moments in your own life.”

“It’s a combo of how we perform in front of the camera, maybe, but also it’s probably the history of art seeping its way out through photography, or echoing through.”

O’Neil’s work was shown on hoardings in Parkville as part of PHOTO 2021 this year, part of the Metro Tunnel Creative Program.

With the $30,000 prize money, O’Neil plans to buy a new custom longboard. Despite growing up near Torquay, she didn’t surf until she was 30. “It’s probably funny that I would use the prize money to buy a surfboard because it is one of the only times I’m not thinking about art. It’s such an all-consuming focus.”

The William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize exhibition is at the Monash Gallery of Art until December 5. See mga.org.au/bowness-prize

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