Dobell Drawing Prize 2025
What is an “expanded drawing”? If we discount the idea that it’s just any old drawing blown up on a screen, it’s one of those convenient terms used to excuse anything an artist might attempt. Over the past few decades we’ve seen countless “expanded” versions of painting, sculpture and drawing, in which definitions have grown so strained they become nonsensical.
For the 2025 Dobell Drawing Prize exhibition at the National Art School Gallery, curator, Lucy Latella, tells us that “expanded drawing” is the way contemporary Australian artists express their concerns. Accordingly, there are many works among the 57 pieces selected as finalists, that are not immediately recognisable as anything so simple as a mark made on a surface.
Is sewing a form of drawing? Can a rope draped on a wall be considered a drawing? How about a circle of seeds on the floor? A video? The Dobell has room for all these unorthodox variations on what is, after all, the primary manifestation of art. The first anthropoid to scratch a mark on a cave wall, a rock or a tree was the first artist. It was most probably a gesture guided by instinct, as the hand picked up on some dim impulse in a mind not yet fully human.