Winners announced for Australia’s Premier Small Sculpture Prize

Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf has announced the winners of the 2025 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, Australia’s most prestigious award for small-scale sculpture, with Auckland-based artist Virginia Leonard claiming the $25,000 top prize.

Now in its 24th year, the Prize continues to celebrate dynamic and innovative approaches to contemporary sculpture, with this year’s winners highlighting the transformative potential of materials and form. Leonard won for Glad that you are not here all the time — an urn for unwanted limbs and other things, a striking work crafted from clay, pure gold, and resin. The piece combines glazed ceramics with resin casting to explore tensions between opacity and transparency, channeling personal frustrations into layered sculptural form.

“I am super grateful and honoured to win the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, and to be showing alongside some incredible works,” Leonard said. “It is such a massive feeling to be acknowledged with this new body of work, as I pour and cast resin in my garage late into the night hoping that what I see and feel, other people will as well.”

An internationally recognised ceramicist represented by leading galleries in Aotearoa, Australia, the USA, and Switzerland, Leonard’s work is held in major public and private collections worldwide.

The Special Commendation Award ($2,000) went to Paddington-based artist Thomas Mason for Torque, an assemblage of stoneware, glaze, construction adhesive, epoxy putty, and cornice cement. Mason, who holds a Master of Fine Art (Research) from UNSW, created a work that draws on the physics of wave motion and the embodied mechanics of making, with twisted forms reflecting the energy and resistance of clay in process.

The Mayor’s Choice Award ($1,000), selected by Mayor of Woollahra Sarah Dixson, was awarded to emerging ceramic artist Alicia Cox for Rack. Through casts of her own body, Cox explores the intersections of domesticity, gender, and the body as vessel, reconfiguring herself into tableware to examine ideas of function, decoration, and objectification.

The 2025 judging panel comprised Sanné Mestrom (Artist and Academic, winner of the 2017 Prize), Justin Paton (Head Curator of International Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales), and Megan Monte (inaugural Director of Ngununggula, Southern Highlands Regional Gallery). Gallery Director Sep Pourbozorgi praised the winning works: “These are powerful examples of the Prize’s focus—how small scale can hold immense conceptual weight. Virginia’s work is both raw and refined, deeply personal yet universally relatable, while Thomas’s piece captures the physical energy of making in an extraordinary sculptural language.”

The 2025 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize exhibition, featuring works by all 54 finalists, is on display at Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf until November 16, 2025. The exhibition showcases remarkable breadth in small-scale sculpture, from ceramic, glass, resin, and neon to matchboxes, paper pulp, and photographic paper.

The 2025 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize exhibition runs until November 16, 2025, at Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf, 548 New South Head Road, Double Bay. For more information, visit woollahragallery.com.au