THE winners of M16 Artspace’s annual Drawing Prize are Waratah Lahy, Tony Curran and Frances Feasey.

The prize is for drawing in either traditional drawing media and techniques, or non-traditional works that extend understanding of what drawing may be within contemporary art practice.

The main drawing prize of $2500 went to Waratah Lahy for her work, “5 days at Jigamy Farm”. It was inspired by an ANU School of Art & Design field studies trip in which Lahy undertook research on the Bundian Way, an ancient Aboriginal pathway running between Mount Kosciuszko and Twofold Bay, in Eden.

In accepting her prize, Lahy said: “Much of what I learned was gained through quiet observation of the landscape, and in reading the nuances of what was both said and not said by local elders and other contributors.”

“I translated this way of learning to my drawings – they are observations of place: describing shifts in light and colour, patterns, texture and line,” Lahy said.

The $500 cash prize went to Tony Curran for his work, “Wiggly Grids”, a hybrid of an exploration into “wiggles and grids”. The artists has been exploring this since 2016. In this artwork he repetitively draws a sequence of squares in the colours of red, green and blue, the error of the hand started to create distortions in the grids that persisted throughout the work.

A $500 framing voucher to The Framing Store went to Frances Feasey for her work, “Night Watch”, which was inspired by back burning in the bush, particularly in the lower Blue Mountains. Feasey works up surfaces with a variety of charcoals, conte and pastels on paper and rubs back into the work with an eraser or hand or a cloth, later building the work back up again with more mark making.

The judges for this year’s prize and finalists were Alison Alder, head of printmedia and drawing, at ANU and Christopher Chapman, senior curator at the National Portrait Gallery.

THE M16 2018 Drawing Prize is on show at 21 Blaxland Crescent Griffith, noon-5pm, Wednesday to Sunday, until Friday, December 14.