I recently entered my piece Exiguous Cubes in the St Patrick's College Art Exhibition, Ballarat. This was the first time I have entered a general art competition of this sort, and it was also the first public outing for Exiguous Cubes as a whole. To my surprise (I wasn't told in advance) I won the University of Ballarat Emerging Artist Prize. The main prize, the Flanagan Award, was won by Carole Wilson's collage work Survey Vessel 2. The judge was Gordon Morrison, Director of the Art Gallery of Ballarat.
Most of the 84 works on display were two-dimensional: largely paintings, drawings or mixed media; there were some photographs and some 2D works involving digital manipulation. There were a number of sculptures and ceramic works. Mine was the only computer-based work, and there were no video pieces, though video works were mentioned in the call for entries. I'm not yet familiar enough with the scene to recognise a lot of the artists' names, but there seemed to be some people with fairly high profiles there, winners of Australia Council residencies and the like.
As a visual artist I am "emerging" according to the conditions of the exhibition. Since I started so late in visual art I am grateful to the organisers for not setting an age limit. Once I heard an artist talk entitled "Have I emerged yet?", but it will be a little while before I have to worry about that.
