2025 Students' Photographic Prize

Maria Fernanda Cardoso

Colombian-born artist Maria Fernanda Cardoso is renowned for her use of non-traditional materials to create sculpture, installations and videos. Using plants, shells, animals and organic materials, Cardoso produces work revealing the correspondences and cultural tensions between modern society and the natural world.

In the early 1980s, Cardoso studied architecture and the visual arts at the University of the Andes in Bogotá. In 1990, she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture and Installation at Yale University.

Cardoso moved to Sydney, Australia, in 1997.

In 2000, the Museum of Modern Art in New York commissioned her to create a major installation for their millennium show, "Modern Starts". Here she installed 36,000 plastic lilies in a 125-foot long wall, which subsequently toured museums throughout the United States. In 2003, she represented Colombia at the Venice Biennale, exhibiting a large installation of starfish woven together into a submarine landscape called "Woven Water".

She had a solo exhibition in 2011 at Melbourne's Arc One gallery centered on the genitalia of male insects entitled "It's not size that matters, it is shape". The following year, she created "The Museum of Copulatory Organs" for her doctoral project. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Sydney linked to the Sydney College of the Arts in 2012.