The shape of home.

For French, that idea begins with a pair of towels.

Her winning work, Patterns for a Home (Some Thoughts I Couldn't Put Down), grew from a photograph taken outside her apartment building after returning from a walk with her baby daughter. Two pink towels hung from the balcony below, set against faded orange brickwork, with bins beneath.

It was an ordinary scene. Precisely for that reason, she couldn't let it go.

“I loved the pink against the faded orange bricks, with the bins sitting underneath,” French says. “Towels and blankets drying over balconies are part of the visual language of our neighbourhood.”

The image remained on her studio wall for years. She first translated it into a work on paper, extending the towels to emphasise their pattern. Later, it became part of a broader practice of walking, photographing, drawing, painting and writing - collecting not only visual patterns but patterns of movement, behaviour, relationships and thought. 

When she returned to the image earlier this year, its meaning had shifted.

“My daughter, our home, and several years of thinking about patterns of suburbia, care and civic life had become embedded within it," she says. 

That evolution is central to French's practice. The architecture remains recognisable, but it is never simply a backdrop. Buildings organise movement, frame views and hold traces of the lives taking place inside them.

“One of the patterns in my writing is called Presence Reveals Structure: attention reveals pattern, and pattern implies structure,” she says.

It is an idea that gives the work a particular resonance with the Allan Gamble Award, which is supported by BresicWhitney and recognises painting that explores the built environment. The award honours Allan Gamble, the artist, architect, former Mosman councillor and founder of the Mosman Art Prize - a history that makes French's intersection of art, architecture and civic life particularly fitting.

“Receiving an award dedicated to the built environment feels like a meaningful recognition of that sustained inquiry,” French says.

Her understanding of suburbia has also been shaped by her work in local government. She sees the built environment not as neutral scenery but as the accumulated result of decisions around planning, investment, maintenance and access - decisions that ultimately influence how people live, meet, move and belong.

At the same time, she is interested in the quieter contribution residents make to a place: the gardens they tend, objects they put outside, routines they repeat and ways they adapt their homes.

Together, those small acts create something larger.

“I’m interested in the point at which repetition makes the ordinary specific, and the private life of a home begins to contribute to a shared sense of place,” she says.

If French finds home in the patterns of suburbia, McIntosh finds it in the material traces of being human.

Her work, Home, received the Guy Warren Emerging Artist Award. Made from synthetic polymer paint, ink, graphite and hessian, it begins with a material that seems almost contradictory: strong, rough and utilitarian, yet loose, vulnerable and surprisingly easy to tear.

“I really like that contradiction,” McIntosh says. “It’s something that appears strong but has a lot of fragility underneath.”

The material itself becomes part of the painting's meaning. McIntosh uses an angle grinder to shave the surface of the hessian, creating subtle shifts in tone and direction. The resulting marks recall the patterns of a football field, where grass changes appearance depending on the direction in which it has been mown.

The process leaves evidence behind.

For McIntosh, that is important. The surface remembers what has happened to it - every movement, mark and area shaved back or left untouched. The physical act of making becomes a record of time, atmosphere and feeling.

The same thinking extends to the frame.

McIntosh sees it not as something applied to the finished work, but as another structure within it: something that holds, supports and protects. Her partner, a professional conservation picture framer, makes the frames for her, adding an unusually personal dimension to the idea.

“We tend to think of things as standing on their own, but actually very little does,” she says. “Buildings need foundations, paintings can need frames, and people need one another.”

It is a deceptively simple idea, but one that runs through Home. The painting's imperfections, tears and openings allow the wall and room beyond to become part of the work. Rather than creating an isolated image, McIntosh allows the painting to exist within the architecture around it.

That relationship mirrors her understanding of home itself.

“Our homes do that too, they gather marks, scratches, things that have happened there and traces of the people who live in them,” she says. “I don’t think those things make a home less beautiful. In many ways, they are what make it feel like a home.”

The 2026 Mosman Art Prize continues a long tradition of giving Australian painting a place to examine the present. Now in its 79th year, the Prize is Australia's longest-running municipal art award, with the exhibition bringing together contemporary works that reflect the ways artists see and respond to their time.

The Mosman Art Prize is currently on display at Mosman Art Gallery, until Monday 26th October 2026. For more information, head to www.mosmanartgallery.org.au.