Congratulations to Victorian-based contemporary artist Shannon Field , winner of the 2026 Perry Prize for Drawing , as judged by Scott Elliot, Assistant Curator, Australian Art at the Art Gallery of NSW.

Shannon takes home the $25,000 acquisitive prize , one of the most significant drawing awards of its kind in Australia.

Selected from a strong field of 41 finalists, Shannon’s winning work, Unnatural History (Bat Blue) , charcoal and oil paint stick on paper, explores themes of environmental precarity, fragmented representation and the instability of contemporary ecosystems.

Shannon Field, Unnatural History (Bat Blue) , 2026, Charcoal and oil stick on paper.

Statement:

The title Unnatural History (Bat Blue) is a play on words, referring both to the 19th century Natural History Museum with its notions of colonialism, control, and display; as well as the sense in which the present moment we’re living in, is witnessing a level of animal destruction that is completely unnatural. As a person who grew up with a stutter, stuttered representation has become central to my practice. In Unnatural History this stuttered, fragmented quality is evoked through the juxtaposition between the body and the head of the bat. The discordant interplay between the two, like the act of stuttering itself, disrupts the dominant, smoothed-out expression of representation through its disjointed and garbled reassembling of visual language. The simplified form of the bat conveys a flat, graphic quality; its blue head sitting askew its charcoal body. Like a type of ragpicking, this stitching together of different types of marks in Unnatural History, alludes to the unstable and precarious state of our wildlife today and the Australian environment as a whole.

Shannon holds a PhD, Master of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of New South Wales (College of Fine Arts) . He has presented solo exhibitions in Sydney, Launceston and Devonport, and has exhibited widely in group exhibitions across Australia. He has been a finalist in several major art prizes, including the Glover Prize , and undertook an artist residency with the University of Tasmania in 2016.

Congratulations go to Shannon and to all finalists and entrants in this year’s Perry Prize.

The Perry Prize Exhibition of Finalists opened on 27 February and continues until 28 March 2026: