SYDNEY.- Transfield Holdings and Sculpture by the Sea announced two respected female sculptors as recipients of this year’s Transfield Australian Invited Artists Program of $15,000 each:

Wendy Teakel (Regional NSW)

Alessandra Rossi (Perth, WA)

Transfield Holdings has been a supporter of Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi for 14 years. The Transfield Australian Invited Artist Program funds two major new works each year for Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi supporting the careers of leading sculptors.

“We are very pleased to support these two female sculptors and we’re happy to see more women achieving this sort of recognition in the arts, particularly in sculpture,” said Guido Belgiorno-Nettis AM and Luca Belgiorno-Nettis AM, Managing Directors of Transfield Holdings. “Congratulations to Sculpture by the Sea for moving in this direction and establishing the Invited Artist Program.”

Wendy Teakel is a celebrated multi-disciplinary artist whose career spans over 30 years. Her work draws influence from experiential senses of place and micro climates, as well as her extensive travels throughout Asia. She presents a new work each year in solo, group, and curated exhibitions, with her most recent solo exhibition, ‘Land Trace’, on display at the Beaver Galleries in Canberra.

Teakel shares a studio at Murrumbateman outside Canberra where she works as a fulltime artist, having recently retired as Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University, School of Art and Design.

Exhibiting for the first time at Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi 2018, Teakel will create a large cross structure made of fencing wire, steel, sheep skins and sand bags as a standing reminder of Australia’s agricultural heritage.

Said Teakel, “I am delighted to be selected as one of the Transfield Invited Artists for Sculpture by the Sea Bondi, 2018. The invitation seemed to come out of the blue! The work I propose evokes an intersection of meridian and parallel. It may stand as reminder to the agricultural heritage of Australia, our need to frame and tame spaces through creating boundaries and fences while acknowledging the fragility of tenure we have within our places.”

Alessandra Rossi began her career as an artist in Venice, working on site-specific installations on the city’s abandoned palazzos. Rossi made her artistic debut in Australia in 1996 ahead of her move to Perth the following year, where she was offered an extended residence at the Claremont School of Art. Her work lies between narrative and abstraction, where she explores the relationship between the superficial and visible contrasted with the invisible and hidden. Her love for site-specific installations reflects these principles.

Rossi’s work for Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi 2018 will be a colourful acrylic, steel and glass mirror sculpture inspired by the ancient tradition of human-made stacks or piles of stones erected as landmarks or pathfinders.

“Thanks to the support of the Transfield Invited Artist Program, I am pleased to be able to present my work Cairn (Marker #1) at Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi 2018,” said Rossi. “Cairns are human-made stacks of stones that have been raised by many cultures since prehistoric times. In my youth in Italy, I often admired cairns when crossing riverbeds and I was struck by how unassumingly simple and unprecious they were. Here in Australia, I would like to raise my own cairn – a marker that in its abstraction and simplification of form, contains the light and colours of the landscape in which it is placed, exposing the hidden and the imaginary.”

Founding Director David Handley said, “This is an important initiative to provide support for new works by leading artists from across Australia to exhibit in Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi, thanks to Transfield.”