Canberra photographer Hilary Wardhaugh has been named 2024 Canberra CityNews Artist of the Year at the annual ACT Arts Awards evening held in the ANU Drill Hall Gallery on Tuesday.

Wardhaugh, well-known in the Canberra community for her family portraits, is also a press and fine-art photographer who was singled out by the judges in the Canberra Critics’ Circle for her provocative, innovative and creative artworks and endeavours.

Her #everydayclimatecrisis Visual Petition has gained international recognition and was also tabled in the Australian House of

Representatives.

For the project, started during covid, she brought together 1247 crowd-sourced images from women and non-binary photographers all over Australia to visualise the effects of climate change.

The critics also praised her passionate solo exhibition Monachopsis (meaning a persistent sense of being out of place) at Canberra Contemporary Art Space Manuka, which began in Queanbeyan where she lived for 15 years until recently.

Wardhaugh noticed that the Queanbeyan Riverbank was littered with what she described as “the detritus of the capitalist Anthropocene era”, later visiting Indonesia’s Bintan Island and Santorini in Greece, where she saw much the same thing.

Another artwork, A Meditation of Death, the judges said, conveyed the impact of conflict through a poignant marriage of technique and symbolism. It comprised 12 lumen prints made by hand-piercing 2000 holes in black cards, exposing them to sunlight, photographing them, then manipulating them digitally.

On learning of her award, Wardhaugh told CityNews: “As someone who always struggles with the name ‘artist’, I think it is absolutely wonderful.

“I’ve been a photographer as long as I could remember and I’ve always done these personal projects while working on my business – they’re something I’ve wanted to do since I finished year 12.”

As well as pursuing a busy career, Wardhaugh has her Visual Petition exhibition opening at the Australian embassy in Berlin on November 28.

She won’t get there in time for that, but will make a flying visit to Berlin around International Women’s Day next year.

And after she gets back from Germany? She’s toying with doing a masters in photography but has no plan to give up exhibiting.

“I’ve always done exhibitions and now that my son is at university, I’ve got the time and energy,” she says.

Earlier in the evening, the Helen Tsongas Award for Excellence in Acting was presented to actor Joel Horwood.

The awards, hosted by the Canberra Critics Circle, also featured the circle’s own awards, which went to: 

Writers: Andra Putnis, Kate Fullagar, Craig Cormick and Darren Rix, and Jeanine Leane.

Musicians: Louis Sharpe and the National Capital Orchestra, Edward Neeman and Stephanie Neeman, Andrew Koll, Luminescence Chamber Singers and Shortis and Simpson. 

Visual artists: Susie and Martin Beaver, David Mac Laren, Caroline Huf, Eva van Gorsel, Hilary Wardhaugh, Alex Asch and Mariana del Castillo.

Musical theatre artists: Queanbeyan Players, Chris Zuber, Free Rain Theatre and Marcel Cole. 

Theatre artists: Amy Kowalczuk, Joel Horwood, Christopher Samuel Carroll, PJ Williams, Karen Vickery and Steph Roberts.

Dance artists: Australian Dance Party, Nathan Rutups, The Training Ground, Larina Bajic and Ql2 Dance.