Wool & Fibre
Winner: Beth Price - Napier

Merit: Patricia Took-Stevens - Raumati
Merit: Angela Singer - Napier
Merit: Loi Lamberg - Opotiki

Ceramics & Glass
Winner: Trudi Kroef - Pokeno

Merit: Rhonda Halliday - Keri Keri
Merit: Iain Trousdell - Havelock North
Merit: Tessa McSherry - Waipukurau

Painting
Winner: Beverly Rhodes - Wellington

Merit: Simon Kaan - Dunedin
Merit: Robyn Gibson - Auckland

Selectors Statement
Art awards bring together a valuable if necessarily disparate spectrum of creative works produced across all levels of background and accomplishment. In this, they can be said to have a useful equalising effect, for recent and established practitioners are judged exclusively on the visual resonance of individual works. Gathered together here, it is my hope that these various paintings, ceramics, glassware and fibre-art items provide the opportunity to assess not only a range of distinct formats and styles, but the degree to which individual meanings rely also on collective expression as a whole. Because technique is never more than a means to an end, I've chosen works that were stimulating to me at the level of form and subject matter, or that somehow presented a visual allure continuous with those of other artwork produced elsewhere today. More importantly, however, I hope viewers will confront these works in the spirit of seriousness and celebration they compel and invite. Even at their strangest and most inscrutable, artworks should provide us with concrete pleasures while forcing us to scrutinize our own assumptions about what it is that makes something evocative at the individual level and for our visual culture at large.
Roberto Tejada (Buffalo, N.Y)

Please visit their website at www.norsewearart.co.nz.