NATSIAA 2026: Ryan Presley wins $100,000 at National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards

Ryan Presley, a Marri Ngarr artist from Alice Springs, has taken out the $100,000 prime prize on the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAAs), the longest-running and most prestigious award for Indigenous artists.

Presley — who additionally has Scandinavian ancestry — gained the Telstra Art Award for his oil portray, Our life-style of tranquillity undisturbed, a portray of a reclining Indigenous man between his canine and a looking rifle, which riffs on Renaissance artworks.

Measuring 1.8 by 1.5 metres, the portray additionally speaks to a quote from British creator George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

Talking to ABC Radio National’s Awaye! on the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Darwin, Presley described his win as each “daunting” and a “great honour” with which he’s nonetheless coming to phrases.

“It’s taken me a while to soak it in,” he says.

He says the portray channels illustration of sacred areas and chamber structure — which could be both a sanctuary or a type of jail or tomb.

“I want these ideas woven together,” he says.

“These are a part of our lives that we negotiate. In Queensland and the Northern Territory, both places I’ve lived and grown up in, our young people are jailed at alarming rates and at very low ages. That’s part of the idea of the work.”

Currently primarily based in Logan in south-east Queensland, Presley has labored as an artist for about 20 years, having graduated from Griffith University’s up to date Australian Indigenous artwork program in 2009.

He has exhibited at Adelaide’s Samstag Museum of Art, Melbourne’s Gertrude Contemporary and the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane.

“I’ve been working for 17 to 20 years and trying to be consistent and build my work and improve my work, so I’m hoping this helps me continue another 20 years.”

This yr’s NATSIAAs had been judged by Kokatha and Nukunu artist Yhonnie Scarce, Trawlwoolway artist Julie Gough and Kamilaroi artist Warraba Weatherall.

“What caught my attention about Ryan’s work is the multi-layered iconography and that story of past, present and, for me, future as well,” Scarce says.

“And I think the precision of the painting, the technique of his work, is just next-level amazing.”

Presley is certainly one of seven winners, from 64 finalists and 221 entries, at this yr’s NATSIAAs, together with $15,000 awards for common portray, work on paper, bark portray and extra.

Blending inventive traditions

In Our life-style of tranquillity undisturbed, Presley attracts on types and iconography from all through artwork historical past, together with Italian Baroque artist Caravaggio, Sixteenth-century Italian painter Domenico Beccafumi’s The Annunciation, and Spanish artist Francisco Goya and his late 18th-century print The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

“I’m threading together several well-known works,” Presley explains.

He needed to mimic how these artworks use mild, shade, and powerful contrasts between the 2 — a method generally known as chiaroscuro.

“The work pushed the boundaries of my skills,” he says.

But the portray is greater than an act of mimicry.

Presley says he needed to “reinterpret” these basic works for contemporary Australia, together with by incorporating a bushfire that blazes within the distance.

In his model, Presley affords the Indigenous determine and Australian panorama the “importance, reverence or magnificence” of the themes of Renaissance work, whereas additionally drawing a hyperlink between the “flourishing” artwork scene of that interval and Aboriginal artists working right this moment.

Presley can be closely influenced by different First Nations artists, together with Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Albert Namatjira, Gordon Bennett, Fiona Foley, Judy Watson, Gordon Hookey and Richard Bell.

That broad vary of influences reaches again to his childhood rising up in Alice Springs and the artists he is labored beside since transferring to south-east Queensland.

“[Alice Springs and Brisbane] both definitely shaped me and my world view and what I hold dear and treasure,” he says.

A 3-time NATSIAA finalist, after being exhibited in 2016 and 2020, Presley is following within the footsteps of his uncle and fellow artist Laurie Presley, who was a finalist in 2007.

“That was really inspirational to me,” he says. “[I thought] if he can do it, maybe I can do it too.”

Now, Presley is proud to hitch the ranks of previous winners, with their work over many years demonstrating the vitality of Aboriginal artwork and artists.

‘A little bit act of defiance’

Larrakia, KarraJarri and Wardaman artist Jenna Mayilema Lee gained the $15,000 Work on Paper Award for her work Taking again taken, during which she weaved dilly baggage from paper maps stolen from the British Museum in London.

The challenge grew from the time Canberra-born Lee — who additionally has Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Irish, and Scottish ancestry — spent dwelling in London in 2019, the place she would go to museums and ask to see their collections of stolen Aboriginal artefacts.

Visting the British Museum sooner or later, she seen the museum’s map of its galleries and services price a urged donation of two British kilos.

“I thought that was really cheeky: to suggest that the world can access their culture here, but in order to find out where it is, please give us 2 pounds,” she says.

When she received residence that night, she realised the map may turn out to be materials for her artwork.

Over the following yr, she returned to the museum to nick extra maps to show into Taking again taken, earlier than she moved again to Australia in the course of the pandemic.

From Australia, she recruited household and associates visiting London to steal maps for her.

“I ended up with this network of people who were pinching maps from the British Museum on my behalf, which is not dissimilar to the way that Empire sent people out to collect world culture,” Lee says.

“The act of taking it was the work.”

It took about 5 years for Lee to work up the talent to show the maps into dilly baggage — which she created within the fashion of the normal objects she would go to in each native and worldwide museum collections.

“[Taking back taken] is the culmination of a number of years, and of that singular moment of realising that I’d just taken material from the British Museum and that there the opportunity to turn it into something,” she says.

It additionally seemingly builds on work Lee created for the 2020 NATSIAAs, titled HIStory Vessels, which landed her that yr’s Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award.

Responding to the 250th anniversary of James Cook touchdown in Australia, Lee used the pages of a Ladybird historical past ebook titled The Story of Captain Cook to make a sequence of objects, together with woven baggage.

Turning paper into string for weaving is a tough course of — one Lee ascribes to her “sheer stubbornness” in addition to to her urge to make work from plant fibres.

But, as an artist working in Melbourne, not on Country, she does not have entry to the normal supplies used for weaving.

“If I wanted to be a weaver, I had to really think about what I was weaving,” she says.

“But if I took a step back and looked around my own home and my own environment, it was just covered in books and paper.

“If I’m following the methods of my ancestors, it is being an professional within the sources round you — these are simply the sources round me.”

The NATSIAA exhibition is at Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, till January 24.