A Moth-Eaten Christian Art Award

The Mandorla Art Award bills itself as “Australia’s most significant thematic Christian art prize” with a focus on “contemporary religious art”.[1] Saint John of God Health Care, Australia’s largest chain of Catholic hospitals, sponsors the winning prize.

This year’s winner, Claire Beausein, a resident of Western Australia, captured the $25,000 prize with a work of art titled Chalice made from “wild silkworm cocoons, stitched together with silk thread, museum insect pins on cotton rag paper”.[2] The theme this year was “metamorphosis”, with a nod to Isaiah 43:19: “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”[3]

According to the award’s curator, Lyn Di Ciero, as mentioned in an article appearing in the Record (“The official magazine for the Catholic Archdiocese of Perth”), Western art’s emergence coincides primarily with religious art and an illiterate populace where the art itself was to convey biblical stories.[4]…