Sydney-based artist Merilyn Fairskye has received the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award with a work that captured Maralinga at the break of dawn – a site with a dark nuclear history. Between 1952 and 1963 Great Britain conducted 12 major nuclear trials and hundreds of minor trials across three sites in Australia, the majority of which took place at Maralinga.
Guest judge, Chris Saines CNZM, Director, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) comments on the winning work, “The spectacular pre-dawn cloudscape that looms over a charged and freighted landscape in Merilyn Fairskye’s Focus infinity III (4.47am, 11 May 2024, Maralinga village), summons up the memory of the nuclear clouds that once loomed over this Country.”
