Art Prizes, Competitions and
Their Role Within Creative Practice

Art prizes and competitions entered my life almost accidentally through photography, yet looking back, I can now see they became an essential part of my creative development. In many ways, they felt strangely familiar from the beginning because I had grown up in the world of competitive ballroom dancing, where discipline, deadlines, presentation, refinement, and performance were already deeply embedded into my understanding of creative practice.

When I moved into photography in 1999, I unknowingly carried many of those same structures with me.

Early in my photographic journey while studying at TAFE FNQ in 1999, photographer and teacher Gary Herbert offered advice that remained with me for decades:

“Now you have learned some techniques,
go out and shoot.
Take a notebook and write about what you do.”

– Gary Herbert

At the time, the words seemed simple and practical. Looking back now, I realise they quietly shaped the entire direction of my creative life. Photography became not simply a technical exercise, but an ongoing process of observation, experimentation, reflection, and self-discovery.

Competitions and art prizes provided focus. They gave me deadlines, conceptual frameworks, thematic prompts, research pathways, and important checkpoints for understanding where my creative energy was moving. They became a way of testing ideas and refining visual language while remaining actively engaged in an evolving practice.

Over time, I realised that art prizes were not simply external competitions. They became frameworks for inquiry. Each submission invited a question:

What am I exploring now? 
What visual language is emerging? 
What matters enough for me to pursue with clarity and commitment?

In this sense, competitions became less about validation and more about creative investigation.

Throughout the years I explored an enormous range of photographic approaches and professional work. Like many photographers, I moved across multiple worlds simultaneously: macro photography, nature studies, portraiture, studio photography, weddings, real estate, corporate commissions, location work, dance and theatre documentation, stills for film, digital manipulation, conceptual imagery, photo-based digital art, abstract photography, environmental themes, and community-based visual storytelling.

At the time, I simply saw this as working and exploring the medium. Only much later did I begin to understand that the breadth itself was part of the artistic identity emerging underneath it all.

Photography became an expansive field of experimentation. Some works were observational, others conceptual. Some were documentary in nature, while others pushed toward abstraction and emotional interpretation. My background in choreography and theatre quietly shaped everything I produced through rhythm, timing, movement, atmosphere, spatial awareness, and visual narrative.

Yet beneath all the technical exploration and professional diversity sat a much deeper question:

What kind of photographer was I actually becoming?
The answer took many years to emerge clearly.

A pivotal moment arrived during my participation in the 2018 SHIMMER Photographic Biennale in South Australia. During my solo exhibition, respected photographer Milton Wordley described me as “an artistic photographer.” Those words may appear simple, yet they profoundly shifted my understanding of myself and my work.

For years I had been creating instinctively from emotion, intuition, atmosphere, movement, memory, and conceptual resonance, yet I had never fully articulated that this was the core of the practice itself. Milton’s observation gave language to something I had felt but not consciously named.

It took nearly two decades from beginning photography in 1999 to fully recognise that I was never simply documenting the world around me. I was interpreting experience through image.

In retrospect, art prizes and competitions played a significant role in that unfolding recognition. They encouraged experimentation, conceptual development, discipline, and continuity. They motivated me to complete work, prepare exhibitions, refine presentation standards, and engage seriously with the broader photographic and visual arts community.

Over the years I submitted work to a wide range of awards, exhibitions, and competitions including the Percival Photographic Portrait Prize, Moran Photographic Portrait Prize, STILL: National Still Life Award, SHIMMER Photographic Biennale, Northern Exposure at Glasshouse Regional Gallery, the Olive Cotton Award, Head On Photo Festival, the Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize, the Lethbridge Prize, Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award, Brunswick Street Gallery Small Works Prize, and numerous regional, community, environmental, portrait, and conceptual art prizes across Australia.

Some resulted in selection, exhibition, recognition, or publication. Others did not.

Rejection became part of the process, as it does for all artists. Some competitions felt genuinely supportive of artistic practice and creative dialogue, while others revealed the commercial realities and occasional vanity structures that also exist within the art world. Over time, discernment became just as important as participation.

Yet even with those realities, the overall experience remained deeply valuable.

Often it was not the award itself that mattered most, but the conversations surrounding the work. Encouraging words from curators, gallery directors, judges, fellow artists, and arts workers frequently carried greater significance than prizes or certificates. Small moments of recognition sometimes became the quiet encouragement needed to continue through long periods of independent practice and uncertainty.

Those moments mattered.

Today, I see art prizes and competitions as one thread within a much larger creative ecosystem. They were never truly the destination. Rather, they became catalysts for exploration, reflection, refinement, experimentation, and artistic self-recognition.

They helped shape not only the work itself, but also my understanding of who I was becoming as an artist.

Looking back now, I realise I was never trying to become an artist through these experiences.

I was gradually recognising the artist I had already been all along.