Jackson's Choice Award 2025

David Rae

Firestone 6

Jackson's Art Prize 2025
Oil
Canvas
170 x 115 cm

“Working primarily as a painter, I research forms as an inroad to combine visual and wider interests; offering a subject which is a vessel to explore overarching themes underpinning my practice. Fusing together settings, it challenges what is familiar. The heightened colour pushes the boundary of the believable. Place has endured as a stage to explore multiple themes. Evolving from here, using locations familiar and borrowed, stories are told of sporting sites, military oppression, and our impacts on the world past and present. All the while larger competing themes and dualisms are being explored. Human interactions are told through their absence, tension arises through further contrasting emotions: hope and despondency; joy and sorrow; safety, and peril. I aim for the works to be uncomfortable, being depressing, threatening, and sublime in the same frame. Certain motifs and structures consistently re-appear, often goal posts, military imagery, and industrial structures.”