Flinders University Museum of Art and Guildhouse are thrilled that FUMA’s current exhibition – Ray Harris: Ritual Nature – has been awarded The Eran Svigos Award for Best Visual Art at the 2021 Adelaide Fringe.

The award honors the life and work of artist Eran Svigos, who passed away unexpectedly in her early thirties. It pays homage to Eran’s love of the Adelaide Fringe by celebrating the contribution of visual art to the festival program and supporting the practice and future work of participating visual artists.

Ritual Nature is a new exhibition of evocative performative videos by South Australian artist Ray Harris, enabled by The Guildhouse Collections Project and delivered in partnership with Flinders University Museum of Art. Curated by FUMA Collections Curator Nic Brown, Harris’ work is informed by a research-based residency undertaken by the artist in late 2019 through 2020, investigating the Museum’s conceptual art collection.

Presented in juxtaposition with selected works from this important archive, Harris’ meditative and time-based actions situate the body in dialogue with the environment, allude to death and its associations with grief and loss, decay and dirtiness, and the possibilities of cleansing and transformation. In this intimate relationship rests a delicate tension between the female body and the environment, where Harris’ seemingly passive acts of surrender to her surroundings can also be considered acts of gendered resistance.

“I feel immensely proud of the work I made through The Guildhouse Collections Project with FUMA during a very challenging year,” says Harris. “Winning the Adelaide Fringe Eran Svigos Award for Best Visual Art is an amazing endorsement and validation of this body of work and my practice.

“This award will allow me to further develop ideas I’ve discovered through this research-based initiative.”

Ray Harris: Ritual Nature is on display at Flinders University Museum of Art until 16 April 2021. For further details, visit the website.