Congratulations to Julia Holderness who has been announced the winner of the Zonta Ashburton Women’s Art Awards (ZAWAA) 2025.

This year’s Premier Award was won by Julia Holderness for her work Villa Margaux: a studio archive. In this work, Julia explores the invented Villa Margaux (France) residency, a fantasy location and an invented art historical frame. The creation of artist-designer Florence Weir, and the narrative that she spent time there painting and making pottery in the 1930s, is also a fabrication. The assemblage of papers, workbook sketches and fragments in this work resembles a historical artist’s archive, but comes from Julia herself, an artist working in the present. The installation investigates the slippage between artmaking, lived experience and fiction, and questions the notion of archival truth.

Returning to the Ashburton Art Gallery and Museum for the ninth year, the ZAWAA award seeks to raise the status of visual artists who identify as women and to acknowledge the contribution women make to greater art discourse. The award is aligned with the values of Zonta International, which exists to advance the status of women worldwide through service and advocacy.

The ZAWAA judging panel 2025 consisted of three professionals within the art sector representing academic, curatorial and practice-based backgrounds. They are: full-time practicing artist Jenna Packer, Senior Lecturer in Fine Arts at Whitecliffe School of Fine Arts Christina Read, and Curator and Collections Manager at Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi O Whakatū Kyla Mackenzie.

Along with a cash prize of $4,000, Julia Holderness has also won the invaluable opportunity to create a solo exhibition at the Ashburton Art Gallery and Museum in 2026.

The ZAWAA25 Young Generation Award went to Margerette Erfe for her sculptural entry I’m an open book? The judges described the work as ‘an endearing, tiny stage set made from book pages that is cleverly constructed and suggests a profusion of competing possible selves and ideas.’

The ZAWAA awards exhibition will be on display until 27 April 2025 at Ashburton Art Gallery. Visitors to the Gallery are encouraged to choose their favourite artwork for the People’s Choice award.

Image Credit: Holderness and the three judges of the ZAWAA award: Kyla Mackenzie, Jenna Packer and Christina Read

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