Art Monthly Australasia magazine and ACT Writers announce Appraise Mentorship Awardees

Congratulations to Amy Walters and Zeta Xu who have been announced as the recipients of the inaugural 2021 Appraise collaborative mentorship. ACT Writers members may already be familiar with Amy Walters work through her previous contributions to ACT Writers New Territory program. We thank artsACT for supporting this partnership with Art Monthly Australasia, and congratulate both award recipients. We are delighted with the outcome and look forward to seeing this work as it unfolds through the year.

A message from Art Monthly Australasia

The humble cover letter is a sometimes overlooked tool for any aspiring writer or artist. In the rush to meet a looming submissions deadline or EOI, it can often be approached as an afterthought, another administrative box to tick, rather than the opportunity to craft an engaging and compelling vision.

But in sitting down to select the two inaugural participants of ‘APPRAISE’ – a new collaborative mentorship program for emerging Canberra writers that Art Monthly Australasia has initiated in partnership with ACT Writers – judges Nigel Featherstone (an author and Creative Producer at ACT Writers), Annette An-Jen Liu (an emerging curator and one of last year’s ANCA Critics-in-Residence) and Soo-Min Shim (an arts writer and Art Monthly Australasia’s Publication Manager) found themselves leaning into a particular pair of writerly voices that sung out above their impressive CVs and writing samples.

For Amy Walters, who has a background in languages and social anthropology, and who for the last three years has run her blog The Armchair Critic from Canberra, her emerging arts writing practice ‘is underpinned by a search for enchantment, and what the writer Amanda Lohrey terms “messages from another realm”: moments which encapsulate the existential precarity of human life, often centring on intimations of death or vulnerability, but also love or profound joy. Lohrey argues that these “messages” resist what is “[t]oo mastered” and “too known” by representing the “oceanic meaning underneath” the “literal surface of life”. While Lohrey’s vision relates to literature, I believe this approach can also be applied fruitfully to visual art, given the role art plays in cultivating our attention on small, often hidden details.’

For Zeta Xu, who is currently completing her Honours in Art History and Curatorship at the Australian National University in Canberra, with a particular focus on art of the diasporic Asian communities in Australia, her writing goals ultimately reside in education: ‘in changing the way that Australasian institutions, from primary and secondary to tertiary education, perceive non-western art. I believe that art writing is an enormously important way to change these views, and that Art Monthly Australasia is such a vital resource in making information about art more accessible in Australia. It is my goal not just to further my own career and experience in this field, but also to contribute to art education in a non-institutional setting (such as in media) in Australia.’

In a particularly competitive field, these two clearly nuanced and articulated visions won over the ‘APPRAISE’ selectors, and this year Walters and Xu will each take part in a three-month mentorship with Art Monthly Australasia’s editorial team, including the development of specially commissioned texts for the magazine’s print and online editions, and the opportunity to participate in a panel on arts criticism co-hosted by ACT Writers in late 2021.

We congratulate them both, and thank ACT Writers and project funder artsACT for not only their belief in this program, but for enabling Walters and Xu to step a little closer to their goals. With their future writings – in these pages and beyond – may enchantment be found, and perceptions shifted.

Michael Fitzgerald

Editor

Art Monthly Australasia