Lilli Strömland

Lilli Strömland’s paintings linger over the theatre of domestic preparation, where kitchen and studio collapse into a shared site of cultivation. Fruits and vegetables are scattered across tables, their forms tilting upward across spatially ambiguous planes. Corn husks flare open, apples gather around tangled cords, while vessels and striped kitchen towels frame these organic protagonists. ‘Recipe Box’ follows Strömland’s recent recognition as winner of the Emerging Artist Prize at the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize (2025).

Her subjects sit on the verge of transformation — ingredients poised between raw state and recipe. Here, the construction of a recipe becomes inseparable from the construction of an image: gestures of slicing, measuring and assembling echo in the layering of pigment and mark.

Recalling Janet Dawson’s later work following her move to ‘Scribble Rock’ in Binalong — where daily engagement with organic farming drew her from abstraction toward an intimate realism of onions, cabbages and cauliflowers — Strömland hones her observation of the world into a deeply attentive encounter with material existence.

Where traditional vanitas paintings meditate on abundance as a symbol of decay and the passing of time, Strömland quietly inverts the form. Her profusions of fruit, vegetables and domestic objects signal not decline but imminent transformation — items destined to be chopped, sautéed, baked and shared.

Strömland has been a finalist in the Portia Geach Memorial Award (2019, 2025), the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship (2020), the Waverley Art Prize (2018, 2025), the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award (2024, 2025), the National Emerging Art Prize (2025), and the Evelyn Chapman Art Award (2018), as well as being a semi-finalist in the Douglas Moran Portrait Prize (2014) and receiving the Chroma Prize for Excellence at the National Art School (2015).