Hornsby Shire Emerging Artist

The Hornsby Shire Emerging Artist Award

Established in 2011, the Hornsby Shire Emerging Artist Award is an annual award delivered through the Hornsby Art Prize. The award is only open to emerging and early career artists residing in Hornsby Shire. Emerging or early career artist is determined as being in the first 5 years of their career. It is designed to celebrate and support local artists whilst sharing locally developed artistic content with the wider Hornsby Shire Community. The award is bestowed on the self-defined emerging artist who produces the most outstanding artwork represented in the finalists’ exhibition. The prize includes cash and a fully supported exhibition at Wallarobba Arts and Cultural Centre.

Previous winners include:

2012 – Ian McGilvray

2013 – Eliza Kinchington

2014 – Jan Foskett

2015 – Nicole Robertson

2016 – Hugh Van Schaick

2017 – Samantha Wiltshire

2018 – Ben Walsh

2019 – Kate Nielsen

2022 – Amelia Ruggiero

2022 Hornsby Shire Emerging Artist

About the artist Amelia Ruggiero

Based in Hornsby, Amelia is an artist who captures the ordinary and everyday life. Her works consider everyday existence, examining overlooked material, moments, and aspects of the everyday. Continuously drawing on her immediate surroundings as inspiration and subject matter, Amelia’s artistic practice has developed from a young age exploring a range of mediums including painting, printmaking, textiles, and ceramics.

Her practice and technique were formalised in completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2019 at UNSW Art and Design. Amelia’s works have been shortlisted in art prizes such as the Pop-Up Posters at Paddington Library, and the Mosman Youth Art Prize.

Amelia’s works focuses on the simple and mundane aspects of one’s everyday existence. Recontextualising moments and materials with the aim to create an opportunity for them to be reinterpreted, even illuminating the beauty in the overlooked and banal. Both the subject matter and the making process considers and echoes the sublime and existential nature of everyday existence. Amelia's printmaking achieves this by capturing immediate snapshots of moments and things through simple energised lines that work to reveal an image. These moments are both visually compelling and intriguing and hold alluring feelings such as contemplation, tranquillity, melancholy, and boredom. Amelia’s weavings transform the everyday material tissues into a structural woven form. She embraces every mishap in her weaving process which results in subtle patterns and textural qualities, turning the mistakes into an appealing form.

_{Image credit: Person Sitting, 2019 by Amelia Ruggiero}

2023 Hornsby Shire Emerging Artist Award Exhibition

'And Other Things'

An exhibition of paintings by the recipient of the 2022 Hornsby Shire Emerging Artist Award.

7-14 June 2023

10am-4pm daily, Wallarobba Arts and Cultural Centre, 25 Edgeworth David Ave, Hornsby