NSW artist becomes just fourth woman in 30 years to win major Sculpture by the Sea prize

Female sculptors with powerful feminist messages have captured the zeitgeist – and the big prize – at Sculpture by the Sea in its 30th year.

NSW artist Harrie Fasher won the $70,000 acquisitive Aqualand Sculpture Award with an abstract six-metre by five-metre steel, bronze and timber artwork.

“This is for all the women, there’s a lot of us female sculptors that make work that’s really outside the square. It’s a battle. I’m the fourth (woman) to have won Sculpture by the Sea (Sydney) in its 30 years,” Fasher said.

She described her work, Unveiling the Edges of the Sky, installed adjacent to the cliffs at Marks Park, as being about female strength, the dissolution of the ego and following your intuition.

After a soggy installation week, Sculpture by the Sea is open, free to the public . There are 100 works on display along two kilometres of the Bondi to Tamarama Beach walk and Marks Park, until Monday November 2.

Reinforcing the female empowerment theme is an installation by Sydney public art collective Omi McCurdie, Matty McCarron and Philippa Lysaght.

The trio’s shockingly playful outsized Sweethearts candies are emblazoned with classic Aussie phrases like “He was drunk”, “She coulda left” and “Boys will be boys”.

Lysaght, a social justice advocate, said the trio, working together for the first time and making their Sculpture by the Sea debut, want to challenge the traditional notions of Australian masculinity that underpin the domestic violence epidemic.

“I was so appalled about the spate of domestic violence and wanted to do something that targets bystander inaction and calls out abuse,” she said.

“I want people to really experience it and there’s no better stage than Sculpture by the Sea.”

McCarron, a filmmaker, said collaborating on the project was confronting.

“I’ve said a lot of these phrases because it’s just so easy to minimise individual instances, but you have to call your mates out and say it’s not OK,” he said.

Over 450,000 people are expected to visit the exhibition, including thousands of schoolchildren, who McCurdie, a practising artist, said are an important part of the national discussion about violence against women.

Sculpture by the Sea was founded by David Handley in 1997, originally as a one-day only event because he did not have the funds at that time to pay for overnight security.