Newcastle Art Gallery has just announced the 2021 winner of the Kilgour Prize, the $50,000 award for a representation of the human figure, now in its 11th manifestation.

This year there were 476 entries for the nation-wide competition, with 30 artists selected to have their works hung on the gallery walls.

They come from every state, with the winning artist, Lori Pensini, from Western Australia. Her innovative grouping of paintings celebrates the Indigenous mix of her family tree.

The nine china plates with painted portraits are arranged in a circular block.

They are full of life, although some at least are obviously based on photographs. There are some babies, photos perhaps the only source material available. A charming inclusion is the pet kangaroo.

The dinner plates are diverse and illustrate the strong links between the two strands of the family.

Pensini was selected for hanging in five previous Kilgour exhibitions.

It is hard to adequately assess the other finalists without a sense of scale.

Some are obviously quite large with others tiny, as we can see from installation shots on the gallery's website. From the line-up there we can see that there seem to be fewer pretty girls and more dramatic men.

There are no giant head portraits and many images that suggest narrative.

James Drinkwater in Nick Finlan's painting sits comfortably in his studio, surrounded by his giant canvases.

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Sometimes the figure is not an individual. John Earle (the sole Newcastle representative?) paints an anonymous swimmer dwarfed by the enticing blue depths of the swimming pool. Lisa Adams invests her bulky figure, plodding away from us into the snowy twilight, with the weight of the world.

I long to see these works in reality to appreciate their scale and the textures of the painted surface. It might confirm that this year's Kilgour Prize entrants conform more than in previous years to the donor's original vision.

There is another major prize exhibition with a Newcastle connection, this time in Melbourne and equally impossible to visit. Michael Chapman is Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle. He has a strong interest in design for flat surfaces as well as an architect's feeling for three-dimensional space. He has just been highly commended for his submission for the International Tapestry Design Prize for Architects 2021.

The Prize is for a large-scale design suitable for weaving by the prestigious Australia Tapestry Workshops. This specialist studio, now 44 years old, has a world reputation for its many contemporary hand-woven commissions which decorate public buildings and embassies in Australia and well beyond. For instance, the wall-filling Arthur Boyd landscape project occupies a prominent position in Parliament House, Canberra.

The brief for the most recent award was, as always, to create a design for a specific architectural space. In this case it was for the Phoenix pavilion in Sydney's Central Park, a postmodernist icon.

There were 141 designs submitted from 23 countries, many by teams of architects and artists, with a judging team of seven prominent Australians.

Michael Chapman was unusual for working without the support of a team. His work, Apocalypse, draws heavily on a series of projects, exhibited earlier this year at the University Gallery in Newcastle, inspired by the great medieval French cycle of tapestries illustrating the final book of the Bible, the Revelation of St John, which describes the end of the world in ninety panels of confrontation between angels and monsters.

Michael Chapman has preserved the allegorised sequence of the original tapestry from 1373, but has transposed the action to a ruined landscape inhabited by cylindrical objects from the modern world. St John as narrator is now represented by a grain silo, the demons and monsters by petrochemical plants and the angels by lipstick canisters, a quixotic symbol embodying art, beauty and all that is best in human achievement.

This virtual cataclysmic comic strip of individual panels would be over nine metres long. Woven in shades of red, it would preserve the overall patterning of the oriental carpet tradition in a densely layered continuum of faith, intellectual vigour and decorative patterning.

It received one of three Highly Commended citations, with the winning work incorporating textile sculpture by the Australian group, Ground under Repair.

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