Photography Review | Brian Rope
Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize (MCPP) 2025 | Various artists
Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre (MRAC) | 14 August – 11 October 2025
As always, it is somewhat difficult to review an exhibition where the artworks are from numerous artists, and the only connection is that they have been selected as finalists in a competition. So, I’ll follow my practice of discussing just a selection of the exhibits, starting with the adjudicator, Antares Wells, awarded pieces.
The winner of this year’s $30,000 is a woman wearing a choker is walking in a crowd, 2024, an inkjet print on cotton rag, inkjet print on clear film 80.5 x 59.4 cm by Johanna Ng. It will be acquired and join all previous MCPP winners in MRAC’s permanent collection of post-war contemporary paintings, ceramic and photography. The prizemoney amount puts this event amongst the major Australian photographic contests.
The work traces what the artist describes as “the parallel erasure of Asian identities in computer vision and network television.” She captured screenshots of Asian bodies then photographed them into new compositions. In this winning image, an Asian woman becomes “a woman” and “a woman” conjures the image of a white one.
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| Johanna Ng - a woman wearing a choker is walking in a crowd, 2024 |
Wells also named two Highly Commended works. They were Miho Watanabe’s Awareness of Between-ness: A Day After My Father’s Departure – Self-Portrait in His Room on His Chair, 2025, and Mungo Howard’s Studio Window, 2025. Watanabe’s artwork is delightful – a self-portrait, taken the day after his father died. Transferred onto silk using a phototransfer technique, the image will gradually fade, mirroring how memory dissolves with time and evoking the quiet passage between presence and absence. I hope I’ll have an opportunity to view this artwork again when that fading has advanced significantly.
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| Miho Watanabe - Awareness of Between-ness: A Day After My Father’s Departure – Self-Portrait in His Room on His Chair, 2025 |
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| Mungo Howard - Studio Window, 2025 |
Let me now comment on just a few of the other finalist works in the exhibition. Hilary Wardhaugh is amongst them for the second year running; this time with her work Dad’s Last Swim, 2024.
The artist statement tells us that before scattering her dad’s ashes into the waves at his favourite beach she made a lumen 'portrait' of him using the ashes. She then washed the paper in the sea, leaving sand where his ashes had lain. Wardhaugh always remembers “Dad being sandy and salty at the beach after swimming.” I have no doubt her family will enjoy this clever artwork about Dad for all time.
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| Hilary Wardhaugh - Dad's Last Swim, 2024 |
I must mention Angus Brown’s Torqued Image Object 1, 2024. How many of us who print our images have mounted them on a rolled aluminium sheet? I certainly haven’t. Brown has done that with this pearl-finished silver gelatin print. He tells us that “In an effort to stretch the conventions of image-making outside the flat pictorial plane, I employ the operations of sculpture into the field of photography……. Maintaining the logic of image making, whilst speaking the language of sculpture, these blended outcomes have come to be known as ‘image-object’.”
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| Angus Brown - Torqued Image Object 1, 2024 |
There are many other interesting artworks in this exhibition, including Carolyn Craig’s Re/mediate, 2024, which is screen-printed charcoal dust on paper. And Tamara Voninski’s Chemo Decay: Sun Ritual, 2025, a photographic lightbox. She exposed images from her chemotherapy-induced dreams to the same chemo cancer drugs that drip into her veins during treatment.
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| Carolyn Craig - Re/mediate, 2024 |
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| Tamara Voninski - Chemo Decay: Sun Ritual, 2025 |
When reviewing the 2024 MCPP, I said that I considered it to be the best one yet overall. This 2025 exhibition is considerably better again.
All the selected finalists and their accompanying artist statements can be seen in a virtual gallery here. However, it would be a much better experience to visit the MRAC and see the finished artworks up close if you possibly can do so.
A longer review is available on the author's blog here and in the December 25 issue of The Printer here.
