The National Art School Fellowship acknowledges the achievements of eminent visual artists, arts administrators, writers, advocates and academics who have made outstanding contributions to the visual arts community in Australia. The Fellowship is an honorary award for exceptional achievement and / or service within the professional domain, awarded annually by the National Art School.
The 2024 recipients of National Art School Fellowships have been announced, with the honour bestowed upon Karla Dickens and Euan Macleod.
The National Art Schools Fellows Celebration was held on Thursday 23 May 2024.
Presented at the annual Graduation ceremony alongside completing Bachelor, Master and Doctor of Fine Art students, the Fellowship is the School’s highest award.
Karla Dickens
The driving forces behind Karla’s need to communicate her cross-cultural heritage as a proud Wiradjuri, Irish and Germany woman, include her life experience as a mother, environmentalist, and activist. Dickens uses recycled everyday items to explore notions of persistence amidst inherent violence and misunderstanding. Made with uncommon rawness and daring, her meticulously fabricated works emanate a rare truthfulness and honesty. Edgy and hard to confine, Karla often cannibalizes existing works to create new ones. She presents a wide ranging and unique interpretation of the real world; where past and present collide in a multi-dimensional kaleidoscope of her own making. She has held annual solo exhibitions and participated in countless group exhibitions and community based projects since 1994 and was celebrated at Campbelltown Arts Centre in 2022-2023 with a 30-year survey exhibition.
In 2023 Karla had work in Shadow Spirit for Rising Festival that will tour nationally and internationally for the next two years. 2020 saw Dickens’ work at the Art Gallery of South Australia Adelaide Biennial – Monster Theatres and Sydney Biennale NIRIN showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and in 2017 at Carriageworks as a part of The National, Defying Empire Triennial shown at the National Gallery of Australia, along with the inclusion in Grounded at the National Art School in Sydney. In 2016, paintings of Karla’s were projected onto the sails of Sydney Opera House as part of Vivid LIVE and in 2015 was included in Wiradjuri Ngurambanggu at Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA).
In 2014 Karla was a finalist in the Australian Indigenous Art Awards at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and in 2014 was included in the Biennial Whisper in My Mask at TarraWarra Museum of Art.
Dickens is represented by Station Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney.
Euan Macleod:
Euan Macleod relocated from New Zealand to Sydney in 1981 and had his first exhibition the following year at Watters Gallery, East Sydney, where he exhibited regularly until its closure in 2018. Since the early 1980s Macleod has exhibited his work throughout Australia including with Niagara Galleries, Melbourne; Victor Mace Fine Art, Brisbane and has been regularly included in group exhibitions in public and private galleries. Macleod also shows regularly in New Zealand, at PCgallery192, Christchurch and Bowen Galleries, Wellington. Macleod is currently represented by King Street Gallery on William in Sydney.
From his first exhibition at Watters Gallery, Sydney, in 1982 Macleod’s main theme has been the human relationship to landscape, often with a single male figure in various forms in an Australian/New Zealand /sea /sky /landscape. These figures are very often huge in relation to their surroundings – sitting inside burnt-out craters, or striding, arms extended out beyond their bodies to blend into mountains.
Macleod has won a number of awards, including the Archibald Prize (1999), the Sulman Prize (2001), the Blake Prize of Religious Art (2006) and the Gallipoli Art Prize in 2009. He was also the Dobell Drawing Prize winner at the NAS Gallery in 2021. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, USA), the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Wellington, NZ), the Christchurch Art Gallery (Christchurch, NZ), the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra, ACT), the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, VIC. Currently, Euan has a major exhibition (Flux) on at Orange Regional Gallery until 2 June, which will travel to Drill Hall Gallery in Canberra later this year.
Euan Macleod was a lecturer in painting at the National Art School from 1997 to 2009 and over subsequent years has returned to the school on several occasions as a guest lecturer and visiting artist.
