Thrilled to have won the 2023 Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize for “Actual Size V (Maratus Madelineae)”!
The “Actual Size” series features the colourful courtship displays of minuscule Australian jumping spiders. They are surely the world’s smallest artists. Magnified hundreds of times their own size, we perceive all the magnificent colours, diverse structures and mesmerising patterns that the males have perfected to seduce their hard-to-get females.
If paradise were to exist, all its spiders would be artists. They would sing, dance and make beautiful pictures.
Focus stacked digital microphotography made in collaboration with Geoff Thompson and Andy Wang. Supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.
“And here is a SPECTULAR Example of Maria Fernanda’s gaze downwards to the life unseen beneath our feet to see creatures usually outside our perception because they are so tiny. This is a photo of an Australian Jumping Spider – from the Paradise Spider genus. In reality it is miniscule – the actual size is on the top RHS/.
Working with scientists in a research project Maria Fernanda has magnified the spider hundreds of times so we can see it with its glorious colours and mesmerising patterns, perfected over thousands of years of evolution to seduce females. She has made the invisible visible to us …in all its natural splendour!” – Jennifer Turpin at the opening event, May 12, 2023
Exhibition of Finalists: 13-28 May 2023 (Thursdays to Sundays) free entry
Location: Ravenswood School for Girls, Centenary Centre, 10 Henry Street, Gordon, NSW
Watch the announcement of the winners in here.
More information on the 2023 Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize in here.