SAM Talks: Ellen Lee; reflections on the 2024 Urbach Prize

Late last year, our 2024 Theodore Urbach Landscape Prize and Studio Scholarship recipient Ellen Lee joined SAM Curator Caroline Esbenshade to discuss Lee's three-month experience at SAM and the growth she experienced in her creative practice both during and since her time in the SAM Artist Studio.

In addition to discussing Lee’s experience, Caroline Esbenshade introduces the Urbach 2025 program and information on how artists can apply for the prize and scholarship opportunity.

Ellen Lee is an Australian artist who works from her home studio in regional Victoria. Working with watercolour, natural pigmentation and graphite, her experiences in nature and her surroundings provide an abundance of inspiration for her large scale works on paper.

Derived from the mappings and collection of marks from blind contour studies and observations of the environment; Ellen’s works centre around an exploration into the changes occurring within the landscape, and the observational nature of documenting, and drawing, in accordance to a natural response to the surrounding stimuli. Her work aims to create an immersive and sensory experience, bringing the viewer into a landscape of time, change and movement.

Ellen Lee is the recipient of the 2024 The Theodore Urbach Landscape Painting Prize & Studio Scholarship. During the 3 month studio scholarship at Shepparton Art Museum (SAM), Ellen’s work will focus on the surrounding wetlands and bird life of Victoria Lake. Read more about Ellen’s experience here.

Ellen Lee was the 2023 Spotlight Artist at Shepparton Art Museum (SAM). Her solo exhibition ‘Landscape; of sight, of sound’, focused on her time in local bushland of Banyula State Forest, with the scale of her works immersing the viewer in a meditative, visual landscape.

Ellen Lee was awarded the DM Myers University Medal for the highest achiever of academic excellence for the College of Arts, Social Science and Commerce at La Trobe University, Australia.

The Urbach program is generously supported by the Theodore Urbach Landscape Painting Scholarship and Prize Charitable Trust. The trust, established through the will of philanthropist and arts patron Theodore Urbach, was designed to provide prizes and scholarship opportunities to benefit artists and students working in the field of Australian landscape painting. 

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About SAM:

Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) is located on Yorta Yorta Country, Shepparton, Victoria.
As a leading Australian regional art museum, SAM showcases its exhibitions and collections in new and exciting ways to create a welcoming, inclusive, and engaging space for all visitors.

Recognised for its significant Australian ceramics collection and nationally significant collection of Indigenous art, SAM’s programming is designed to be locally relevant and engages with global contemporary ideas. Through its exhibitions, collection, programs and events, SAM creates a place where art helps us to better understand the ancient culture of this country and contemporary multicultural Australia.