Every year we invite a couple of people from the arts world to be our Independent Judges who will have the arduous task of selecting a winner (or winners) for the Grand Prize in our annual Biblio Art Prize! For the 2021 edition of the Biblio Art Prize, we are proud to announce that our Guest Judges are Helen and Ben Fennessy - that perfect partnership of writer and artist! Here's a little bit about each of them.
Helen Fennessy is a prolific writer and avid reader. Her qualifications are a Masters of Arts, Writing and Literature; Bachelor of Letters, Honours, School of Literary and Communication Studies and a Bachelor of Social Work. As a former Research Fellow at Deakin University, Helen was involved in writing self-help guides and her poetry and short stories have been published in anthologies of the Deakin Literary Society. She has written two brilliant! (unpublished) novels and is a member of the Flinders’ Street Mob Writing Group, Writers Victoria and a local Book Club.
Ben Fennessy is a painter and printmaker. He was born in Melbourne and at age 13 began taking painting and drawing lessons from Bill Coleman (painter and printmaker from the George Bell School). At 16, Ben won a scholarship to attend the National Gallery Art School, Melbourne, where he studied painting & drawing in the 1960s and he did further studies at the Victorian College of the Arts in the 1980s. Ben has been a practising artist for over half a century, has exhibited widely and was a tertiary arts educator in Geelong for many years. Landscape is the primary inspiration for his artwork, in particular the environment of the wild Victorian South West coast & the volcanic plains, especially his current fascination, Tower Hill.
Together they have been creating and appreciating visual art and story telling for many years and have previously judged art exhibitions in Birregurra, Port Fairy and Warrnambool. Their combined backgrounds of artist and writer make them ideal as the judges for this year’s Biblio Art Prize.
Comments