Anita West
Anita West is an established Brisbane based artist renowned for her ethereal large-scale paintings of the Australian Bush. With a career spanning over thirty years, she has held more than twenty-five solo exhibitions in New South Wales and Queensland. Her work is featured in public and private institutions, including Parliament House in Canberra, which acquired her art in 2019. Anita won the Lethbridge Landscape Prize in 2024 for her piece “Banksia Rain,” praised for its captivating scale and environmental narrative. Her paintings reflect a deep connection to the Australian bush, capturing its beauty and resilience.
Dr Carl Warner | lecturer, photographer, artist
Arabella Walker
Arabella Walker is from a maternal line of Wulli Wulli, Auburn Hawkwood people. She is an early career contemporary Aboriginal artist. Walker’s practice conveys significant topics of First Nations histories with a focus on the challenge of being an Aboriginal woman living in the Colony. Walker deals with this challenge by weaving Indigenous ways of knowing and being into knowledges of culture and protocols, connections, and traditions, through a variety of media. The body is activated to express ideas, cultural knowledge, histories, stories and cultural connections. Media, such as acrylic paints, video projections, and installations form an interdisciplinary dialogue. Walkers creative process communicates a cultural intent in ways that words can not.
Emerging from a dance background, Walker incorporates multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary practices. Walker achieves this by using explosions of colour and energetic mark making that wash over her. Dance is used to connect traditions of ritual and ceremony as a form of contemporary expression. Analysis of research methodologies and data collection extend and strengthen Walker’s creative art practice in all its forms. Walker seeks research connected to personal history; further development of creative self; community connection; academia; and First Nations culture.
Cre8 Art Prize 