Winners Announced For Zonta Ashburton Women’s Art Awards For 2025

Now in its ninth year, the Zonta Ashburton Women’s Art Awards focuses on the art of emerging and mid-career artists who identify as women living and working in Waitaha Canterbury. At the awards ceremony on March 07, Ashburton Art Gallery and Museum Director Shirin Khosraviani spoke about the amazing number of entries for this year’s awards, resulting in the Young Generation category being allocated its own gallery space for the first time. She also noted the high caliber of work that was submitted to the awards this year, which resulted in a particularly tough selection process.

With an unprecedented 126 entries this year, 30 finalists were selected from the 100 entries for the Premier Award, and 25 entries were featured in the Young Generation Award category, for those aged 16-20 years.

This year’s Premier Award was won by Julia Holderness for her work Villa Margaux: a studio archive. In this work, Julia explores the invented Villa Margaux (France) residency, a fantasy location and an invented art historical frame. The creation of artist-designer Florence Weir, and the narrative that she spent time there painting and making pottery in the 1930s, is also a fabrication. The assemblage of papers, workbook sketches and fragments in this work resembles a historical artist’s archive, but comes from Julia herself, an artist working in the present. The installation investigates the slippage between artmaking, lived experience and fiction, and questions the notion of archival truth.

Judge Kyla Mackenzie, speaking on behalf of judges Jenna Packer and Christina Read, expressed that ‘exhibiting at The Ashburton Art Gallery is an important first step for many. Putting yourself out there like this is a huge deal and has made for two diverse, compelling exhibitions.’ She described Julia’s winning work as ‘a feast for the eyes but also the mind. The artist has developed a slippery fiction: a female artist named Florence Weir working in the 1930s who travelled to the Mediterranean as did other real NZ artists such as Frances Hodgkins. We buy into this story willingly and dwell over Florence’s travels, writing, photos, pottery, fabric design and working ideas.’

Along with a cash prize of $4,000, Julia Holderness has also won the invaluable opportunity to create a solo exhibition at the Ashburton Art Gallery and Museum in 2026.

The ZAWAA25 Young Generation Award went to Margerette Erfe for her sculptural entry I’m an open book? The judges described the work as ‘an endearing, tiny stage set made from book pages that is cleverly constructed and suggests a profusion of competing possible selves and ideas.’

The ZAWAA awards exhibition will be on display until 27 April 2025. Visitors to the Gallery are encouraged to choose their favourite artwork for the People’s Choice award.

Winner of the ZAWAA24 Premier Award Marie Porter’s exhibition Recloaking is also on display and brings a sculptural consideration to the undertaking of harvesting pine trees. In the gallery, Porter houses three cubes within an atmosphere that suggests verdant native forest. Two of these, each a metre cubed, utilise the detritus of the pine harvesting process (‘slash’), and can be imagined as units of time, space and volume – all essential considerations in pine forestry. The third cube, a stand of the native white pine Kahikatea serves as an aspiration that biodiverse native forest will again cloak the denuded whenua. Recloaking will run until 27 April 2025.

The awards exhibition is delivered through a partnership between the Zonta Club of Ashburton and the Ashburton Art Gallery and Museum, and generously supported by the following local organisations:

Ashburton District Creative Communities, Forsyth Barr, ANZ Private Banking, Bushey Park Trust, Everist Gilchrist Lawyers, Samantha Rose Flowers and Straight Eight Estate Vineyard, Terrace Croft, The Rabbit Ashburton, Scorpio Books, Kate Murney and Barkers Foodstore.

Exhibition Details:

ZAWAA25

Opening | 07 March | 7pm

Exhibition | 08 March – 27 April 2025

Marie Porter, Recloaking

Opening | 07 March | 7pm

Exhibition | 08 March – 27 April 2025

Gallery Hours:

Open Daily 10am – 4pm

Open Wednesday 10am – 7pm

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