2021 Tatiara Art Prize Winner

Deborah PRIOR

(Adelaide, South Australia)

The Shortest Day of the Year
woollen blankets, assorted fabrics, yarn, metallic thread 123 x 175 (cm)

acquired by Tatiara District Council

Artist statement:

My grandmother was born on the shortest day of the year. Raised on a dairy farm, I remember/imagine her reluctantly peeling back blankets and scurrying through icy, pre-dawn gloom to rest her cheek against Judy’s warm flank.

When the first small holes began to fray her memories, I started stitching forms cut from a blanket lifted down from the highest reach of her linen press.

First it was one work, then two, then half a blanket packed into a case to Italy and home again, then more, and then the scraps of those works became new works and then there were more scraps from these…until my home was snowdrifts of small, confetti-ed, fuzzy grief.

When she died, I was compelled to return all of these tiny scraps to their previous, domesticated existence. I patched together tattered scraps and wonky holes unearthed from the cracks of my home, each one holding a material link to that first, short day…until they were a blanket once more.

I thought this would be the final work. But my cutting - stitching - weeping produced more scraps still. Pressed fabric spots flutter from the pages of an art journal, a craggy field of pink waits its turn in the living room, and ends of threads I cannot abandon settle in the creases of my bed sheets.

Both burden and relief, so it continues.

Judges comments:

Ben Quilty (artist)

Tansy Curtain (Curator of International Art pre-1980 at the Art Gallery of South Australia)

Fulvia Mantelli (Director, Murray Bridge Regional Gallery)

Deborah's work is the kind of work to bring you back, to offer you more, to make you feel and to make you question. Rather than a simple picture she offers us, with painstaking detail, a look into her most private emotions. It's so much more than a pretty picture, it's a quietly stellar work by a dedicated and clever artist. - Ben Quilty

Deborah Prior’s large-scale textile work The Shortest Day of the Year is an evocative work which draws the viewer into the story of the artist and her grandmother. It is a work about love and loss and finally restoration. Each stitch is made with intent and each piece of cloth is placed with precision in order to rebuild and repair that which has been lost. Made from vintage Australian woollen blankets this beautifully crafted work speaks of connections – intimate family connections; the wool industry and its critical connection to regional and remote communities and our inherent connections to the land we live on. From a distance the work reads as a giant topographic map and alludes to the connection all Australians have with our landscape – difficult and challenging when considering the loss and destruction of landscape, people and culture through colonisation but concomitantly beautiful, wonderous and resilient. At a time when human beings across the globe are struggling with loss and loneliness, Prior’s work is an emotionally effecting work which offers the audience hope that we can rebuild from these losses and come together, albeit in an altered (and perhaps more beautiful) form. - Tansy Curtain