Artist crowned winner of major sculpture awards for aluminium-built sculpture

Joan Johnson, a renowned artist from Nedlands, received the prestigious Alcoa Major Award, which comes with a significant prize of AUD 10,000, for her artwork titled 'Deconstructed, Reconstructed and Embellished' in the City of Rockingham’s Castaways Sculpture Awards 2024..

Image Source: City of Rockingham

The deconstructed dice sculpture, a one-metre high and five-metre long piece, is a striking combination of aluminium, wood, and perspex, each material contributing to its unique aesthetic and structure.

The dice has six circular dots crafted from woven aluminium cans, set back in the construction and covered with perspex, reminiscent of portholes.

Johnson has been a regular exhibitor at Castaways since its genesis in 2008. Awarded with three minor prizes and a highly commended cognisance, Johnson said that she was awed and beholden at the same time and honoured to have received the Alcoa Major Award.

"This is my first major award with Castaways. It has always been a pleasure to exhibit in the event, with its seamless organisation by all who run it, but this year, and to win, was even more of a pleasure," she chirped.

Judges Angela McHarrie and Stuart Elliott deemed the work fitting of manifestation of Castaways' ethos of the need to consciously reduce our collective footprint and make conscious and sustained decisions to conserve what we have.

"The brightly coloured, seductive aluminium of the cans is held in tension by the expanse of the surrounding grey aluminium, mutually alluding to a mapped landscape. Indeed, the captured circles' meticulous warp and weft forms a kind of grid giving a sense that this is big, a global concern," they said, "It is a beautifully developed work which embraces the basic premise of Castaways with a substantial elegance."

Swan View artist Damien Gavillet's win of the AUD 5000 Capral Aluminium Sustainability Award with Crushed, a crushed oil barrel suspended in an iron ring, serves as a stark reminder of our daily consumption of 100 million barrels of oil.

Golden Bay artist Gary Aitken was awarded the AUD 2000 City of Rockingham Local Resident Award with Those Who Have Passed, an aluminium skull with crosses all over it, as a memorial to those who have passed and are not forgotten.