Prize Winner
Alluvium, thanks to my models Julia, Crystal, and Devyn
Alluvium is an hourglass filled with sand made from smashed fragments of symbolic objects. Each one carries a story of how women’s identities are eroded across time: a postcard for personal histories and voice, dried flowers for cycles of life, eggshells for body autonomy, a compact mirror for surveilled self-image, prescription bottles for control through systems and institutions, and iron filings for strength and endurance. Ground together, they form the residue of a lifetime.
Time is never neutral. Women age into cultural invisibility, their roles shifting under the weight of external expectations and internal reckonings. The hourglass makes that erosion literal: once-cohesive objects reduced to dust by the forces of convention and tyranny.
Yet erosion is not only destruction. What remains in the sedimentation also testifies to persistence. The fragments do not disappear, they shift and transform. Women endure as iron filings among the dust, as petals layered among the shards. The hourglass holds both the pressure of becoming invisible, and the freedom of no longer needing to perform.
Honorable Mention
Radka Rosenbaumová
Linocut print of a snail. I found a bounty of partly broken, empty snail shells on a riverbank. My intention was to break them even more and use them to recreate the snail.
I crushed the shells and hammered the shards into the lino block to make indentations. For the second layer, I covered the snail with Mod Podge and used the shell shards to scrape it. Then I combined classic lino cutting with more hammering of crushed shells into the lino block.
