While Zaachariaha Fielding is used to working with sound, and working with canvases, cardboard wasn’t necessarily the most likely medium or material to inspire the artist to creative expression.
Key points:
- Zaachariaha Fielding has won the Ramsay Art Prize people’s choice award
- The Electric Fields singer-songwriter was inspired to take up painting after a US tour was cancelled because of COVID
- Fielding says the prize-winning piece was started while other work was drying
But Fielding — who had already achieved renown as a singer-songwriter with electronic music duo Electric Fields — found inspiration while he was taking a break from seeking inspiration, using downtime to produce a painting that has now claimed a lucrative honour.
As part of this year’s Ramsay Art Prize, Fielding’s creation Wonder Drug has won the people’s choice award, sufficiently resonating with gallery-goers to be voted the most popular work with the public.
The work has been described as a depiction of “battling voices, both internal and external” , and comprises more than a dozen individual panels featuring “little faces” — referred to by Fielding as “the gremlins”.
“The work started off just as a ‘play around’ because I wasn’t really into cardboard, so I’d be waiting for my canvases to dry and then I would muck around on cardboard,” Fielding told ABC Radio Adelaide’s Deb Tribe.
“I used the … cardboard to just de-load everything and download everything and play with what was happening with the pattern on my thoughts, whether they were good thoughts or bad thoughts.
“And it just became a work where I was the therapist and the patient in the gremlins.”
The Yankunytjatjara artist, who dedicated the $15,000 award “to the elders and leaders who started my studio in Adelaide”, was surrounded by paintings at a young age, growing up near the Mimili Maku Arts centre on SA’s APY Lands.
“I’ve been painting for almost four years now. I’ve been around a lot of powerhouse painters — my father is one of them, Robert Fielding,” Fielding said.
“It always interested me but, at that time, I didn’t have the patience, I didn’t know what to do.”
But when an Electric Fields tour of America was cancelled, because of the pandemic, painting presented itself as an option.
“Through COVID, I gained another career,” Fielding said.
“The way I dance on the stage is no different to the way I dance on the canvas.
“I started doing it and then I was doing another canvas and then I was jumping on another canvas, and then all of a sudden midway through they were like, ‘Would you like an exhibition?'”
The people’s choice prize is not the first time Fielding has been recognised for visual art — the painter also claimed the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s 2023 Wynne Prize for a work that captured “the sounds of Mimili”.
Earlier this year, South Australian artist Ida Sophia took out the top honour at the Ramsay Art Prize, winning its $100,000 prize.
Works by the finalists are currently on show at the Art Gallery of South Australia, and Fielding hopes that those who go will themselves be inspired to find their own creative outlets.
“I like it when people see themselves in my work,” Fielding said.
“Whether you like the work or not, just really sit with it. It’s such a beautiful thing being an artist, and you don’t even have to be an artist to get it.
“You just have to be one with yourself, and try and dismiss all the noise that is going on.”