Nedlands artist takes out Rockingham's Castaways Sculpture Awards

Nedlands-based artist Joan Johnson has been crowned the major winner of the City of Rockingham’s Castaways Sculpture Awards 2024. 

Ms Johnson was awarded the $10,000 Alcoa Major Award for her work: Deconstructed, Reconstructed and Embellished.

Created from aluminium, perspex and wood, the deconstructed dice is one-metre high and five-metres long.

The dice’ six circular dots are crafted from woven aluminium cans, set back in the construction and covered with Perspex, reminiscent of portholes.

A regular exhibitor at Castaways since its inception in 2008, winning three minor prizes and a Highly Commended acknowledgement, Johnson said she was astounded, yet grateful and honoured to have received the Alcoa Major Award.

“This is my first major award with Castaways. It has always been a pleasure to exhibit in the event, with its seamless organisation by all who run it, but this year, and to win, was even more of a pleasure," she said.

Judges Angela McHarrie and Stuart Elliott said the work was a fitting manifestation of Castaways’ ethos of the need to consciously reduce our collective footprint and make conscious and sustained decisions to conserve what we have.

“The brightly coloured, seductive aluminium of the cans is held in tension by the expanse of the surrounding grey aluminium, mutually alluding to a mapped landscape. Indeed, the captured circles’ meticulous warp and weft forms a kind of grid giving a sense that this is big, a global concern,” they said.

"It is a beautifully developed work which embraces the basic premise of Castaways with a substantial elegance.”

Other winners at Castaways were Shoalwater artist Kelly Robbins who won the $5000 Innovation Award with Pin Cushion Protea consisting of bright yellow flowers created from street sweeper brushes with fan blades as leaves. 

Swan View artist Damien Gavillet won the $5000 Capral Aluminium Sustainability Award with Crushed, a crushed oil barrel suspended in an iron ring representing the fact we consume 100 million barrels of oil each day.

Winner of the $2500 Maquette and Small Sculpture Exhibition was Hilton artist Valerie Schonjahn with Travellers, two high fired porcelain receptacles topped by cleverly woven pointed mounds of chip packaging. 

Golden Bay artist Gary Aitken was awarded the $2000 City of Rockingham Local Resident Award with Those Who Have Passed, an aluminium skull with crosses projecting from it, as a memorial to those who have passed and are not forgotten.    

Two artists were Highly Commended: Ed Stafford in the Sustainability Award, and Sky Edwards in the Maquette and Small Sculpture Exhibition.  

In the Castaways Schools Competition, Rockingham Beach Education Support Centre won the Alcoa Primary Schools Exhibition with I’m a peliCAN, not a trash CAN, and Rockingham Montessori School Adolescent Program won the Secondary School section with Outer Harbour.

Two schools were Highly Commended in the Alcoa Primary Schools Exhibition: Endeavour Schools and Settlers Primary School.    

Rockingham Mayor Deb Hamblin said there had been a steady stream of visitors to Castaways at the Foreshore and Rockingham Arts Centre.

“It’s wonderful to see so many visitors admiring the inventive and stunning sculptural works made by artists and schools who have all risen to the challenge of transforming recycled materials into objects of beauty.”