Centrefold Art Competition Winners 2025
1st Anaïs Walton-France
Bad Taste
Bad Taste is based on a digicam photo of me and my friends pre-drinking for a bad taste themed party. Acting as a celebration of feminine connection, the painting is inspired by Frank Rispoli, a New York based photographer who captured women's shoe choices in the punk and grunge club scene during the late 70's and early 80's. Exploring concepts from that series, Bad Taste highlights the synthesis of fashion and club culture, and the performance and projection of women's sexuality and desire in these spaces. I acknowledge the inherent patriarchal connotation of heels yet transform the symbol of historical oppression into an act of empowerment for women.
I'm a fourth-year Fine Arts student, and my practice engages with my feminine identity through painting, exploring self-portraiture through figurative and still life subjects. Working from photographs, I intend to highlight the tension between ideas traditionally feminine and unconventional.
2nd Kristi Kotze
Girls Who Like Girls, Who Like Boys
I’m a fourth-year Fine Arts student whose work often plays with humour and relatability, aiming to connect with a specific audience while also telling stories about myself. Girls Who Like Girls, Who Like Boys is a mixed media painting that takes a lighthearted look at three friends on a night out. The neon colours mimic the flashing lights of a club, while the warped faces capture that familiar mix of tipsiness, adrenaline, and chaos that comes with partying with your friends on a night out. Like much of my practice, this balances playfulness and self-expression, turning everyday moments into something exaggerated, colourful, and a little bit messy. Which is an accurate representation of my life as a young adult and hopefully resonates to others in the same way.
3rd Arie Smith (Te Arawa)
Hinengaro
Hinengaro is a homage to the deep, profound spiritual connection we as humans have to the land, nature, and Papatūānuku herself. It’s a reminder that we are no different to each other. I am multi-disciplinary artist in my second year studying a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours. I’m most interested in the relationship between mind, body, and soul -- exploring both my own internal and external worlds in my practice, as well as the unique intersection between both. My creative practice is my way of giving back and spreading aroha; A vessel to deeper frequencies of growth, awareness, and realisation; A call back home to oneness and higher alignment.
4th Miles Greville
The Warmaster Arrives
This work was born from a simple lightbulb moment of “haha what if Horus and the other traitor primarchs from Warhammer were like Aussie dads.” When I started The Warmaster Arrives, I was feeling fed up with the constant need to think deeper about one’s work. All I wanted to do was create a fun painting for myself, something I could enjoy making and displaying with no need to explain every little detail. As a final-year Fine Arts student, I’ve recently identified a major factor of my creative practice that I should be serious about being silly. It’s a silly idea to combine figures from a made-up universe designed to sell plastic miniatures with the bogan, car-centric life of dads down under — but I’ll take the depicting of this very serious.