Strong Voices

Young Kāpiti Coast artist Max Hinds-Brown has won the IHC Art Awards for 2023 with a beautiful retro painting of a red chair.

There was a strong showing by Kāpiti artists in this year’s awards, with them winning first and third prizes.

Max’s Red Chair was the top pick out of 493 entries from artists with intellectual disabilities and picked up the $5000 first prize. The work brings out the detail and textures of the fabric and the strong elegance of the design. Max, 19, mostly does his art at Paraparaumu College but he also takes an art class at The Shed Project in Paraparaumu.

The painting is based on a chair at Te Waka Huia o Ngā Taonga TukuIho – Wellington Museum. Max particularly liked the shading on the chair and background. It is his favourite museum and has inspired some of his other artwork.

Second place and a $3000 prize went to Courtney Youens, for her collage My Dad. “I made a portrait of my Dad,” she says in her artist statement. “He likes cars and helping people. I used handmade paper. I ripped little pieces of paper to add detail to my design.”

Courtney, 21, does her art at The Papermill in Whangārei.

Third place and $2000 went to Erena Wylie for her beautiful Korowai Tui Cloak. Erena, 39, works at the Kāpiti Art Studio.

The cloak’s 304 feathers are made of recycled bicycle tyres. It took Erena hundreds of hours to cut and colour the ‘feathers’ and weave them into the cloak. Erena says she’s taken over her lounge at home, which has now become her ‘lounge studio’.

Dannevirke High School student Ryko McAvoy-Hope, 16, won the Youth Award and $1500 for Farmer. “I put the road in and then I put the buildings in,” Ryko says. “The front of the picture is myself. I do farm work during most of the weekends.”

The Youth Award is for entrants aged 13 to 17 and an exciting trend is the number of younger artists entering the competition since the Youth Award was introduced in 2021. This year 58 young artists entered.

The winner of the L’affare People’s Choice Award was Paraparaumu artist Manaia Matakatea (Muaūpoko, Ngāti Raukawa – Ngāti Huia) for his work Grocery List.

Twenty years of stunning art was celebrated in the Capital on 20July at an anniversary celebration attended by a number of past winners and judges. The event was held in a pop-up gallery in central Wellington, where all 493 entries in this year’s awards were being exhibited. It was the first time in the national competition that all the entries had been exhibited together.

The IHC Art Awards, supported by the Holdsworth Charitable Trust and L’affare, has been running since 2004. Previous winners have gone on to exhibit their work throughout Aotearoa and overseas.

The exhibition was held from 12 July to 9 August. Any artworks that didn’t sell in the gallery were to be sold on Trade Me, with 100 percent of the sale or auction money going to the artists.

Art Awards Ambassador and IHC New Zealand Patron Dame Denise L’Estrange-Corbet celebrated artists and winners past and present, telling the audience that she longed for better recognition of them and their work.

The judges this year were Tim Walker, Auckland-based Arts and Culture Consultant; Mark Hutchins-Pond, Webb’s Art Specialist and Elizabeth Caldwell, Director Art & Heritage at Experience Wellington.

“It seemed daunting, but it was actually great to walk into the gallery completely chock-a-block with nearly 500 artworks,” Tim says. “There was so much colour – and once we started looking and talking among ourselves as judges, we each drew attention to some really extraordinary works.”

Elizabeth says she was very impressed with the range of work submitted as well as the quality. “We were tough judges, looking for a compelling combination of technical skill and imaginative flair with regard to the ideas being expressed.”

Mark says what struck him most about the installation of the entries was the sense of energy and joy. “There was so much colour and vitality in the artworks, it was impossible not to smile and feel uplifted in their presence.

“As Elizabeth has said, we were tough judges; revisiting and scrutinising each work a number of times before coming to our decisions on whom we should award the prize to.”

If you are interested in buying one of the artworks, contact us at ihc.events@ihc.org.nz.

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