Record field named for 2026 Fisher’s Ghost Art Award

The finalists for the 2026 Fisher’s Ghost Art Award have been announced, drawn from a record number of entries in what organisers describe as the most competitive year in the prize’s history.

Now in its 64th year, the annual award and exhibition invites artists to submit work across a range of categories and mediums, with more than $60,000 in prize money on offer. At its centre is the celebrated Open Award, valued in 2026 at $50,000 and acquisitive to the Campbelltown City Council Art Collection — meaning the winning work enters a permanent public collection that has been built, year on year, through the prize itself.

That lineage is part of what gives the award its standing. Over the decades the Open Award has gone to some of Australia’s most respected contemporary artists, among them Elisabeth Cummings, Suzanne Archer, Marion Borgelt, Raquel Ormella, Justene Williams, Khaled Sabsabi, Tina Havelock Stevens, Kuba Dorabialski, Robert Fielding, Michael Cook and Angela Tiatia — a roll call that tracks the shifting concerns of Australian art across a generation.

This year’s field spans the Open, Contemporary and Traditional categories, and the calibre of entries made the selection process the tightest yet. Among the Open Award finalists are Marian Abboud (Sister ++++ Familial Formations III), Nadia Hernández (Sentí que ya nada era mío (I felt as though nothing was mine)), Tom Polo (The Rehearsal (Self Surveillance For A Stage)), Caroline Rothwell (Physic garden (ultramarine)), Brian Robinson (Terraqueous: On stranger tides), Deborah Kelly (Early Bird (for Fiona Winning)), Jahnne Pasco-White (Material immortality 17), Eleanor Butt (Orange Veiled Abstraction) and Emily Crockford (I love her cake it is so yummy, Jam Cream).

The Contemporary category is no less varied, with finalists including Blak Douglas (Son Nation), Andrew Frost(External Observations [In the Selvanarca Observation Zone]), Tina Wheatley (Karen), Nina Apolonia Dorabialski(Babcia Made Me Do It! (Steal The Cabbage)) and Camille Perry (Tandem Bykes). The Traditional category, meanwhile, gathers landscape and still-life painters working in a more classical register, from Bob Gurney‘s Goobragandra Autumn Beauty to Nola Tegel‘s Still Life with Wattles.

All finalist works selected for the exhibition will be available for purchase — an opportunity for collectors to acquire pieces by both established names and emerging artists in a single show.

The Fisher’s Ghost Art Award coincides with Campbelltown’s annual Festival of Fisher’s Ghost, a ten-day celebration first held in 1956 and named for Australia’s most famous ghost, Frederick Fisher. The pairing of a serious acquisitive art prize with one of the country’s most enduring pieces of local folklore has become part of the award’s particular character — civic, community-minded and, six decades on, still drawing some of the strongest work in the country.