Perpetual, as Trustee, and the S.H. Ervin Gallery has announced artist Kate Stevens as the winner of the inaugural Evelyn Chapman Art Award, one hundred and thirty years after Evelyn Chapman’s birth. Stevens’ winning work Gaza forms part of an ongoing series exploring how we process images of war from the domesticity of the home which the artist looks to develop using the scholarship. The award provides a $50,000 scholarship for an Australian painter, male or female under the age of 45, to ‘engender the encouragement, development and rewarding of artistic skill, through furthering the training and knowledge and skills of Australian painters.’

The Evelyn Chapman Art Award is a new award established in the memory of Evelyn Chapman (1888 – 1961), an Australian painter and the first female artist to depict the devastated battlefields, churches and towns of the western front after the First World War. A respected artist, Chapman exhibited at the Salon in France but was forced to retire as a painter following her marriage; however she continued to espouse art education and practice. Evelyn Chapman’s archive including artworks, photographs and correspondence between her and her daughter is held at the Art Gallery of NSW National Art Archive.

Image: Kate Stevens, Gaza. Courtesy of artist.