Melbourne-based visual artist Anthea Kemp has been named as the recipient of the 2025 Theodore Urbach Landscape Painting Prize and Studio Scholarship, conducted at Shepparton Art Museum. Read on to learn more about Anthea, her practice, and her upcoming activities.

Anthea Kemp is based in St Kilda, Melbourne. She creates paintings that capture her interest and fascination with nature, and becomes the second artist to be awarded The Urbach Landscape Painting Prize and Studio Scholarship, for which she will receive access to the SAM Artist Studio, a $5,000 cash prize, and a $5,000 scholarship stipend to support her ongoing creative and professional development. Kemp has presented her work in several solo exhibitions at institutions including Stockroom Gallery, Kyneton, in 2023; and in 2021 at Wangaratta Art Gallery, Wangaratta. She obtained her Masters in Contemporary Art from the VCA, University of Melbourne, Melbourne in 2019 following her Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) from RMIT University, Melbourne in 2013.

Kemp’s paintings are a blend of representation and abstraction, an intuitive response to nature that distils the interplay of light with the forms she encounters in the landscape. Her works also embody her sense of custodianship and the care she feels for nature. Her interest in conservation has its roots in childhood, growing up on farm and bush land covered protective covenant.

Awarded The Urbach at the end of March, Kemp began her three-month engagement with the scholarship in May and will be working on site three to four days a week through July. Working alone in the SAM Artist Studio will be a shift from her usual studio environment—a shared studio space in a quiet, but urban area. Kemp looks forward to walks around Lake Victoria and enjoying the wider spaces of the regional landscape.

As part of her three-month scholarship, Kemp will volunteer and undertake research at the Euroa Arboretum, learning first-hand about their conservation programs, the flora of the region, and their work with the Goulburn Broken Indigenous Seedbank. Already she has been producing gouache studies and small oil paint sketches on-site at the Arboretum that will be references for larger pieces she develops in the SAM Artist Studio.

Working with themes of the Australian Landscape, she aims to highlight the conservation efforts taking place across Australia and the knowledge she gains. In developing this new body of work, she will be producing work that translates the visual and ecological rhythms of form in the landscape into painting, whilst also exploring and investigating how the personal connections to land preservation, made in her formative years, manifest in her practice today.

On 20 May 2025 SAM team members Caroline Esbenshade, Mikela Guseli, and Kati Hogarth caught up with Kemp in the SAM Artist Studio to get a glimpse of what she’s begun working on.

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CE: While you're here at the SAM Artist Studio, what type of work will you be producing?

AK: I'm focusing on making a series of paintings in response to the time that I'm spending at the Euroa Arboretum and the seed bank there. While there I'm learning about what they do, their initiatives to regenerate and conserve the land, and about the education that they provide to other people in the region—individuals and larger groups or organisations interested in land conservation and regeneration.

CE: Outside of your time working at the arboretum and producing work in the studio, are there any other things that you're looking forward to as part of your engagement with SAM through The Urbach?

AK: Yeah, there are a lot of professional development opportunities that are being created for me, like meetups with different gallerists and curators, and having an arts writer commissioned to do a piece about what I'll be doing over the three-month period.

CE: I know its early days yet, but already in the first few weeks of accessing the space, has there been anything that has surprised you?

AK: Mainly it's surprised me how very comfortable I've felt with all the different communities that I've been interacting with. SAM, for example— how welcoming and close everyone is, and even over the past weekend while attending the Art as Business program I saw how close the artist community here is and how SAM is such a great place for people to connect and share ideas. Also at the Euroa Arboretum, I'm seeing that community. It is a community initiative, and hearing about the different phases and stages of different people coming in and passing on knowledge and that sort of thing. And because I've been working with the volunteer program, I've been learning a lot from the volunteers who have really great knowledge—a lot of them have different expertise in horticulture. So just learning about that, and being part of the community, that's been quite surprising to me.

KH: Can you tell us a little bit about what your typical day will look like while you're here?

AK: I'll be at the arboretum on most of the Mondays, working in the volunteer program, and then here at SAM either Saturday or Sunday to Tuesday or Wednesday. At the moment, I'm coming in and I'm working on smaller studies. I'm playing and being pretty loose, referring to studies that I'm making at the Arboretum, as well as some photos that I take. I'll make a lot of these to find different compositions that I'm interested in exploring on the stretched canvas.

MG: These works here, are these some of the studies you've done at the Arboretum so far?

AK: Yeah, some initial sketches that I was doing yesterday, quickly and with a quite limited palette as well.

MG: Are they inspired by a particular spot?

AK: Yes. This is a newish sort of garden that they've got going there. And I was talking with Bronte, the grounds manager, about she had just done some planting of a grass known as kangaroo grass. They've just done a new planting under two particular eucalypts to control an introduced grass that keeps coming back. I really like the grasses, it’s got this beautiful seed head and has this lovely way of, like, drooping. There's something really lyrical or graceful in the line. And in the afternoon at the arboretum, the light is just crazy magical. And with the grasses, like fanning out everywhere with the light that's coming through…it looks really cool.

MG: And these canvases, are they something that you’ve worked on just in the time that you've been here?

AK: Yes. This is a very initial, like, ground making, really loose. I just wanted to do something when I was here. So, I stretched these up, which can be a bit of a labour of love thing. And after, I just really wanted to get some paint on them. At this point I'm just playing around, what’s there will probably form some kind of aspect of the composition, but I think they'll probably go somewhere very different as I continue to work on them.

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To hear more about Anthea Kemp's experiences, keep an eye on our social media channels. An artist talk with Anthea Kemp will be held on Sunday 27 July 2025 at SAM to celebrate the end of Kemp's Urbach scholarship, where she'll share her experiences and the outcomes. You can also learn more about her practice on her website and follow her on Instagram at @antheakemp. 

The Theodore Urbach Landscape Painting Prize and Studio Scholarship is generously supported by The Theodore Urbach Landscape Painting Scholarship and Prize Charitable Trust, managed by Equity Trustees.

Note: Interview portions of this article were pulled from a longer exchange and edited down for clarity.

All images by Shepparton Art Museum, unless otherwise stated.