On August 28, Sydney-based artist Sophie Cape was announced as the winner of this year’s Hadley’s Art Prize, an annual acquisitive award for Australian landscape art endowed with AUD 100,000 (USD 65,200). 

A retired professional athlete who began her artistic career after enduring sports-related injuries, Cape often explores the physical and emotional potency of nature in her work. Her winning canvas, Thunder shifts the shivering sands (2024), features expressive, rust-colored streaks and smears of locally sourced soil, rust, and charcoal. She produced this piece after severe flooding and landslides ravaged southern New South Wales last year, describing it in a statement as “a portrait of survival and decay, beauty and destruction.”  

The jury—comprising Southern Kaantju/Umpila multidisciplinary artist Naomi Hobson; director of curatorial and cultural Collections at the University of Tasmania, Caine Chennatt; and Tasmanian-based artist Catherine Woo—commended Cape for her “remarkably executed, compelling, and resonant” depiction of Australian scenery. They further noted that her work is an “honest record of environmental upheaval,” embodying “a perceptible, visceral relationship between human presence in the nonhuman world.”

Founded in 2017 by Don Neil and Annette Reynolds—current majority owners of Hadley’s Orient Hotel in Hobart—the prize is dedicated to supporting contemporary Australian landscape artists. The works of all 29 finalists will be exhibited from August 29 to September 21 within the hotel’s customized gallery spaces.

Arphy Li is an editorial assistant at ArtAsiaPacific.