Historical information

Lou HUBBARD (1957 -)
Born Brisbane, Queensland

After a career in the film and television, Melbourne based artist Lou Hubbard completed a Master of Fine Art at RMIT University in 2001. She works primarily with video and installation, and has exhibited widely throughout Australia and internationally, Lou Hubbard is currently the Head of Photography at the Victorian College of the Arts.

In announcing the award 2015 Guiguis New Art Award the judges applauded Lou Hubbard on her compelling installation, which comprised a deflated, disembowelled latex horse collapsed over a Coalbrookdale patio chair, table and bench seat situated over a skateboard and plastic dog. “Occupying a space between the traditions of equine, assemblage and unmonumental sculpture, Lou Hubbard’s Dead Still Standing confounds and compels viewers in its uncanny play of materials and movement,” senior curator, contemporary art, National Gallery of Victoria and judge Max Delany said. “In this elaborate yet concise work, Hubbard has created a form of surprising and unsettling effect that reflects our experience of a world in translation.”

The win came as a surprise for Hubbard, who said she was overwhelmed at the talent of all 15 finalists. “I was so surprised, because I was in good company with the other artists, who were all quite extraordinary,” she said. “In the nature of the competition, I feel very lucky.”

With multi-layer meanings to her piece, Hubbard said it was actually Ballarat’s rich history that inspired her work. She said it was the Ballarat goldfields and the idea of what horses might have gone through during those years that gave her a concept to work with.
But that wasn’t the only source of ideals portrayed in the piece – Hubbard also explored the effect training had on horses. “The horse stands in a way that portrays (how) the human exhorts the way of training,” she said. “The horse is edging like it wants to move, which is impossible, and the furniture acts in lots of ways. The chair, for example, is like the horse’s ribs, which are being ripped out.” It was these multiple meanings that also had the curator of the Post Office Gallery, Shelley Hinton, impressed with the work. “The work challenges us ethically and culturally, in a way that pleads for analysis, as we do in our complex daily lives,” she said.

Physical description

Lou Hubbard's 'Dead Still Standing' won the was awarded the prestigious $20,000 Guirguis New Art Prize in 2015. The Federation University Guirguis New Art Prize was a national biennial and aquisitive contemporary art prize. The $20,000 biennial acquisitive prize was sponsored by Ballarat surgeon Mark Guirguis, administered by Federation University Australia and presented in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ballarat.The genesis of the prize was to raise the profile and encourage the Art School of what was then Ballarat University.