The Queensland Regional Art Awards (QRAA) is an annual visual arts prize and exhibition for established and emerging artists living in regional and remote Queensland. The program aims to provide a platform for further professional development.
The 2024 QRAA explored the concept of ‘Resolution’. Artists and society as a whole grapple and confront multiple viewpoints and concepts requiring resolution. Through the creative process, artists take this voyage through differing personal and social lenses to reach a meaningful resolution in their work. This reflects and is relevant to the broader journey of society.
2025 Touring Exhibition Locations
Judith Wrighth Art Centre, Brisbane – 14 February 2025 – 24 March 2025
Consolidated Properties Group Offices: 27 March 2025 – 27 March 2026
Explore Regional Queensland’s best emerging artists.
This exhibition contains beautiful works from artists living in Regional Queensland selected by Simon Wright from 2024 QRAA entrants. From the Sunshine Coast, Cairns, Ipswich, the Gold Coast, Hervey Bay and more, these artworks represent the emerging talent present across the state.
Thanks to our award partner, Consolidated Properties Group, a selection of works from the 2024 QRAA Emerging Artist Award category will be exhibited from the 27th of March, 2025 to the 27th of March 2026 in the Consolidated Properties Group Brisbane offices.
The Emerging Artist Award is proudly sponsored by Consolidated Properties Group, FireWorks Gallery and OneSpace.
The Emerging Artist Award Finalists – JWAC/CPG
Anna Guthrie – NO FIXED POINT
Region: Burpengary East
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: Ceramic
Dimensions: 70 x 12 x 60
Weight: 2 kg
Statement: Anna Guthrie’s work reflects the notion that “Resolution’ is not tethered, rather a continuous cycle of formation, dismantling, and perpetual reconstruction. Lines gouged into the ceramic form, speak of the ease with which our understandings and decisions can be taken apart and reassembled, often multiple times, before reaching a sense of completion. The re-attached elements and multiple apertures hint at fragments and voids that remain during the process. The gathering of hand-formed spheres in one corner – the collective effort and patience required to piece these fragmented moments together as an act of restitution. With its rough and eroded aesthetic, evoking a scarred landscape, this work speaks of the resilience needed to weather the passage of time, and persistence required to find any element of resolution.
Christopher Bentley – Dead End
Winner – Victoria Reichelt Focus 4, 2024, Oil on Linen, 76.0 x 3.0 x 91.0 cm.
Region: Woodend
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: Photograph, Nintendo Gameboy Camera, 3D Software
Dimensions: 42 x 0.3 x 30
Weight: 0.5
Statement: Dead End is a photograph created using a combination of obsolete tools—rendered in 3D software from 1997 and captured through a Game Boy Camera. The low resolution of the image reflects the theme of Resolution both in its visual output and by commenting on technology’s life cycle. As technology advances, we are confronted with decisions about which tools and platforms to adopt and what gets left behind. This work explores the inevitable “dead end” faced by outdated software and hardware, symbolising the end of life for these technologies, yet preserving them in an abstract, low-resolution photograph that could potentially survive longer than us. Dead End invites viewers to reflect on the idea of progress. As we adopt new technologies, we often leave behind our ability to access digital data, information and memories stored on obsolete platforms. The work encourages contemplation of how we navigate these transitions, questions the fragility of our digital history and how much of it we can truly preserve.
Denise Cross – She is Clothed in Strength and Dignity
Region: Ipswich
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 90 x 5 x 120
Weight: 10 kg
Statement: Cherylee Chilly is a lady of strength and integrity who has soldiered through so much in life determined to bring positive resolutions to what life has thrown at her; heartbreaking broken marriage, devastating loss of her father to dementia, courageously accomplishing a degree in Psychology, whilst simultaneously the sole-supporter throughout the tumultuous journey of her three children diagnosed with ASD and ADHD. Her selflessness and desire to utilise her challenging life experiences, led her into the industry of spending countless days seeing the brokenness of humanity with Mercy Community Services mainly throughout Logan and Beaudesert, having a close affinity drawing from her own indigenous heritage. Her desire to see restoration and positive resolutions in families’ lives, have transposed into her personal life, consolidating that negative life’s circumstance can be turned around into a positive light.
Katrina O’Shannessy – The Calm After the Storm
Region: Wondai
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: photograph
Dimensions: 45 x 0 x 31
Weight: 0.5 kg
Statement: Mother & Daughter
Fierce friends & at times fiercer enemies, but inevitably, resolutions can always be found. No matter the circumstance or course, that bond is unbreakable & pure. As inevitable as the end of the day & your shadow, as the sun casts its last light.
A time to reflect & come together and just be as one. No words required. The morning will come, the sun will rise & mother & daughter shall stride forward with their shadows in tow.
Kristen Flynn – Self-portrait dreamverse collage orange
Region: Chinchilla
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: Monotype and collage on Fabriano paper
Dimensions: 29 x 0.1 x 29
Weight: 2 kg
Statement: My work ‘Self-portrait dreamverse collage orange’ plays with the boundaries of reality to rebuild my identity. Becoming a mother whilst building my contemporary art practice, has been one of the most challenging yet rewarding periods in my life. As an artist, I create self-portraits to build, depict and interrogate my identity. Utilising collage has allowed me to break down and remodel my face to explore transcendence, otherworldliness, motherhood, maternal loss, beauty, abjectness, and the multi-dimensional nature of identity. My third eye symbolises the knowledge and experience I have gained since entering a time of mother-artist. Furthermore, ‘Self-portrait dreamverse collage orange’ adds to the growing narrative of women artists depicting themselves, and to the inclusion of mothers’ perspectives into art history. I created this work by layering collaged pieces of solar-plate etchings, and digital prints, over a solid orange monotype.
Louise Gregg – TRY
Region: Federal
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: upcycled thread, clothes and copper
Dimensions: 41 x 3 x 51
Weight: 3.5 kg
Statement:
Commitment
Focus
Adapt
Purpose
Satisfaction
The artwork TRY extends a new direction in my art practice. I live off-grid rural, and it’s a journey to the shops for any material. With the current cost of living crisis affecting people’s finances, my focus for this piece was to repurpose leftover thread, clothing, and up-cycled copper pipe, I had at home, which resolved one issue – economics. Textile-focused, and hand-made, the intuitive construction method afforded me the way to express my heart and vision, this being the second resolution – technical. During research for this work, I stumbled across the history of a ‘Wagga’. The ‘Wagga’ is a distinct hand-made utilitarian quilt/rug/blanket born out of necessity, uniquely Australian from 1890, stitched together from up-cycled materials that were available to people at the time, just making do! I contemplate this artwork TRY a contemporary ‘Wagga’, the third resolution – conceptual.
Meg Stoios – A More Comfortable Life and a Steady Salary
Region: Coolangatta
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: watercolour on paper
Dimensions: 56.3 x 0.1 x 76.4
Weight: 5 kg
Artist Statement: ‘A More Comfortable Life and a Steady Salary’ depicts the resolve of two figures who remain attached to the workplace (eyes forward, pride-themed lanyard in tow), despite work precarity anxiety. By playing with humour, examining the folly of office accoutrements and design, the artist seeks resolution to the discomfort of their own experience as an arts worker. Completed during a period of work instability and underemployment while high costs of living and housing insecurity are at an all-time high, the work begs us to laugh instead of cry.
Resolving the issue of living and working as an artist and making ends meet is near universal within the arts yet is seldom depicted by contemporary artists. Often when it has been explored, the trope of the destitute genius appears to glamorise the experience. An antithesis to this approach, this work is honest and compassionate.
Both figures were painted from life.
Melania Jack – Domestic Body
Region: Crownthorpe
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: video collage
Dimensions: N/A
Weight: N/A
Artist Statement: In ‘Domestic Body’, feminist irony confronts the housewife role and its deeply ingrained gender training. A constant, patronizing pink bleeds into the skin, a forced smile persists. The body has become the machine—washing machine belly, iron hands— I am both the tool and the labor. Yet, the glitch disrupts, revealing underlying emotions: fear, regret, anger, and frustration.
This video collage work critiques the unresolved tension within our society. These issues and their accompanying statistics remain stubborn: the gender pay gap, patriarchy’s control over women’s bodies, violence against women, and the persistent burden of unpaid and low-paid labor. Women disproportionately shoulder this labor in the home, in caregiving industries, in factories, and more recently in cleaning up the environment and the aftermath of wars.
The work navigates these unresolved contradictions, blending the physical and psychological to expose the imbalance at the core of our social structure, refusing resolution.
Naomi-Jon Redshaw – A Year of an Artist’s Life
Region: Clinton/Gladstone
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: Mixed Media Artist Book
Dimensions: 116 x 10 x 48
Weight: 1.5 kg
Artist Statement: ‘A Year of an Artist’s Life’ is an art journal filled with my experiments, progress and resolutions as an artist over 2023 and 2024. Each page expresses a different part of my artistic practice and experiences that resolved challenges and revolutionised my creative process.
Sara Gonzalez – Return 3
Region: Bray Park
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: Stoneware Clay
Dimensions: 22 x 17 x 17
Weight: 4 kg
Artist Statement: Emerging from the wood fire as a relic of action & process, my vessels showcase the stoneware clay form which has been treated with wood-ash, shino & chun glazes. The way they melt & craze over the belly of the vase, all surfaces & perspectives are distinctly individual. The alterations made to the base of this vase give the body of this work its contemporary edge. I strike my wheel-thrown vessels with wooden rods to finish the work’s foot once leather hard. A technique developed through experimentation & play, a resolution to the hours & hesitance that comes from one of the final stages of making ceramic vessels, trimming the base. Like many before me I have become infatuated with the rituals & traditions which surround the wood firing process, the relationships cultivated over long hours of stoking. The offering of work which has been carefully completed into the kiln, in the hopes that after days of firing they will emerge as once in a lifetime treasures.
Andrea Baumert Howard – Intersection
Region: Ipswich
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: Lino print on handmade paper
Dimensions: 48 x 0.1 x 33
Weight: 0.7 kg
Artist Statement: In a world dominated by rapid development and shifting landscapes, this work speaks to the connection between natural and built environments. A stark lino print of a power pole and streetlight on a textured handmade surface, junk mail and office discards reimagined into a delicate canvas. The rigid lines of the power pole contrast the organic, unpredictable fibres of the paper, echoing the tension between order and chaos, progress and preservation.
The beauty of architecture highlighted through simplicity in lines. The resolve to move forward, even when the path is unclear. Approaching this work with resolution reflects a determination to confront the environmental challenges we continue to face. My commitment to using recycled materials embodies the decision to create with meaning and purpose. This piece strives to spark conversations about choices, impacts of daily decisions, and how resolution can serve as a guiding force, bringing clarity and hope amidst confusion.
Doug Mcneill – Valley End Tallebudgera
Region: Tallebudgera
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: oil on linen
Dimensions: 91.4 x 3.3 91.4
Weight: 2 kg
Artist Statement: “Valley End Tallebudgera” Is referenced from my exploration and walks through the Tallebudgera Valley in the hinterland of the Gold Coast. As the Anthropocene continues elements of our environment appear to be in a state of flux, affecting our geology, landscape, limnology, ecosystems and climate. My paintings portray the landscape seen through my lens, in that moment, knowing that it is a view that will change as mankind continues to encroach further into our natural environments. It was the sun breaking through the palm grove and the long leave grasses moving slightly in the breeze that caught my attention resulting in the painting. It is a location that inspires my idea and the resolution of the final work is achieved by employing any of the skills of observation, memory, en plein aire sketches and photography that contribute to my concept for the work to be resolved as a completed painting.
Edward Lucas – Resolving the Hidden Wonder
Region: Toowoomba
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 40 x 5 x 30
Weight: 1.8 kg
Artist Statement: This painting captures a moment of sudden clarity and inspiration. On an unexpectedly bright spring day, I found myself drawn to my garden in a way I had never experienced before. What I had once overlooked became a source of wonder, and I felt compelled to paint it. Inspired by Claude Monet’s (1840-1926) depictions of his garden, I resolved to explore the beauty in my backyard. The work reflects the theme of “Resolution” — a moment where I shifted from seeing the everyday as mundane to recognising its peaceful beauty. Through this piece, I explore the cycles of nature, the transformation from winter to spring, and the personal realisation that beauty exists in the most familiar places. This painting is a resolution between the ordinary and the extraordinary, a reminder to appreciate the moments that unexpectedly captivate us.
Celebrating the legacy of material Humphreys continues a genealogy of art making and woodworking – constructing site-responsive built forms that map domestic spaces. Employing reductive abstraction, her playful architectonic installations respond to location, engaging the viewer to move around the work and the exhibition space it inhabits.
Jaelene Durrand – Waiting for the Tide
Region: Atherton
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: Waiting for the tide
Dimensions: 30 x 1 x 42
Weight: 5 kg
Artist Statement: Waiting for the Tide, explores the theme of resolution through the solitary presence of a single mangrove at low tide. The mangrove, with its exposed roots, symbolises resilience and patience in the face of changing environments. It stands quietly, waiting for the return of the water, a natural cycle that promises renewal and continuation.
Through the medium of watercolour, the fluidity of the tide and the delicacy of the mangrove’s relationship to the land and sea are emphasised. This piece invites the viewer to consider the power of persistence and adaptation in nature and our own lives, reminding us that resolutions often come not in moments of action, but in the quiet waiting for change to come.
Julia Goulding– The Survivor
Region: Cairns
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: acrylic on paper
Dimensions: 30 x 0 x 4
Weight: 3 kg
Statement: My creative aim is to produce an artwork that brings both joy to my soul and to others. Over time, I have come to realise that simplicity, minimalism and colour are the foundational hallmarks of work that pleases me. “The Survivor” is just such a work.
The artistic process involves the pushing and pulling of serendipitous marks with a final elimination phase to bring the work to a resolution. The gnarled branches, the hollow trunk, and the stoic remnants of a once great organism can be a metaphor for life.
Is the tree senescent or is it merely dormant?
Is it shelter and repose for other organisms?
Has it plentiful progeny to continue its role in life’s purpose?
Libby Hunter – Deluge
Region: Clifton Beach
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 50 x 4 x 80
Weight: 2 kg
Statement: This landscape is inspired by the Cairns flooding in December 2023. My small backyard seasonal creek turned into a raging water torrent which was only of small impact compared to many other parts of Far North during the aftermath of Tropial Cyclone Jasper. Even though there was a huge amount of water flowing through my enviroment the ability for nature to resolve itself after such devastation was amazing to witness. After the rain eased and the sun came out and the water subsided a new visual landscape emerged in many areas, new waterways were formed, rockbeds appeared and new new sandbanks formed. It was heartening to see natural able to resolve such devastation and return, maybe visually different, but restored to its previous natural state.
Sandy Scarborough– Between Land and Sea
Region: Bundaberg South
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 40 x 4 x 50
Weight: 1 kg
Statement: Migratory shorebirds, such as the lesser sand plover, are experiencing a critical decline due to habitat loss. These birds depend on specific coastal and wetland environments for nesting, feeding, and resting during their long migratory journeys. However, increasing development along shorelines—through urbanization, industrial projects, and recreational areas—has severely disrupted these vital ecosystems.
As these shorebirds confront the dire consequences of our choices, I invite viewers to reflect on the tension between human progress and environmental stewardship. My artwork aims to inspire dialogue about our collective responsibility to protect endangered species and their habitats. It calls for resolution—not only in the preservation of wildlife but also in finding a sustainable balance between development and nature.
Sara Za Enback – Tears on Pine Needles and Rain on Freshwater Lakes
Region: Macleay Island
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 46 x 4 x 91
Weight: 1 kg
Statement: This artwork depicts a longing for a land of pine needles and freshwater lakes.
What is the resolution to the logistics of combining two homes, two hearts, two families and two lands? Negotiation, courage, adjustment, time, respect, boldness, subtleness, slyness, intention, willpower, motivation, compromise? Or just simply love?
William Loveday – Growth roots
Region: Townsville City
Completion Date: 2024
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 80 x 2 x 101
Weight: 5 kg
Statement: The painting Growing Roots explores how place shapes identity, delving into the complexities of connection and belonging. This piece captures the vibrant, textured essence of North Queensland’s landscapes, particularly focusing on the grevillea bush. The abstract representation invites viewers to reflect on how their surroundings influence their identities and experiences. Through the act of painting, I navigate the tensions between abstraction and representation, striving for a meaningful resolution that harmonises my personal narrative with the broader social landscape.
