Patricia Gill, Denmark Bulletin

Denmark artist Melissa Boughey’s painting, State of Flux, Symbiosis, won the 2025 Omnia Art Prize announced in Toorak, Victoria recently.

Melissa, who heard about the win while at home, said she had felt overwhelmed: “There were long distance tears over the phone. I’m touched and surprised.”

Melissa’s work, which attracts a $15,000 prize, is an oil and beeswax abstract landscape painting.

Now in its 54th year, the Omnia Art Prize and Exhibition at St Kevin’s College, Toorak, is a premier annual prize celebrating Australian contemporary art.

Proceeds from the exhibition sales support youth facing barriers to accessing education, enabling Omnia Art to invest in the future of both artists and students.

Guest judge and distinguished arts leader Sophie Travers commended Melissa’s painting for its ‘wild and joyous energy, and freedom within the genre of landscape painting, uninhibited by conventions and norms’.

Melbourne’s Flinders Lane Gallery director Claire Harris received Melissa’s prize on her behalf.

Melissa exhibits work at Flinders Lane Gallery.

The prize is fortuitous as she and husband David Britten are working on an upgrade to her studio overlooking wetlands at their farm and vineyard, Moombaki.

Melissa said she spends time painting around the vineyard and cellar door season on the farm where she and David have lived for 30 years.

“The winter is particularly fruitful for my painting practice, usually following a road trip,” she said.

“While Dave prunes the vineyard I am normally working on an exhibition (Sydney or Melbourne) and deep in studio mode.”

A small sculpture award of $5000 was included in the award for the first time this year and went to Victorian, Hamish Donaldson, for Azura, a work of blown and engraved glass.

Judge Sophie Travers said Melissa’s work was the kind of painting that ‘refuses to sit still, and whoever is lucky enough to live with this piece will see something new in it each time’.

“There is space for the imagination and space for the changing light in a room to shift and unsettle the viewer and bring new ideas to the surface each time it is seen,” Sophie said.

Melissa said the work had come about through trusting in the process of painting and allowing the work to come to its own fruition.

“It’s important for me for the work to have its own innate energy for there to be some tension between thin translucent layers and heavier, waxy paint,” she said.

“I am delighted that the selection committee and judge have seen this in the piece, and I am grateful for the award, which is a tangible boost to my practice.”

Hamish Donaldson described his work as a ‘reflection of temple spaces, speaking to structures and spaces we hold as sacred and that stand to connect us deeper within ourselves and to the unseen dimensions’.

Hamish’s and Melissa’s works were selected from more than 250 shortlisted entries submitted by leading and emerging contemporary artists around Australia.

Omnia Art Prize Committee convenor Natalie Barnes, said this year’s collection was defined by moodiness, characterised by nostalgia and pockets of light and joy, blending darkness with hope and beauty.

She said this was perhaps a response to, and a reflection of, the times.

Melissa and Hamish join a distinguished list of previous winners including Drew Pettifer, Kent Morris and Belem Lett.

This article appeared in Denmark Bulletin, 12 June 2025.