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The 2008 Margaret Senior Award

The winner and highly commended student for the 2008 Margaret Senior Wildlife Illustration Award are final year Natural History Illustration students Trudy Fennell and Bronwyn King. In it's 24th year, the award recognises a student who has completed a body of work to a professional standard and who through an interview process is judged as exhibiting a high level of commitment to the area of natural history illustration. The scholarship is made possible though an endowment donated by the late wildlife illustrator, Margaret Senior and administered by the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service now located in the Department of Environment and Climate Change. The following are statements from the award winning students.

Trudy Fennell

I have always loved painting and drawing animals and about nine years ago joined the local wildlife rescue group (NATF). After discovering the Natural History Illustration program at the University of Newcastle, I found that I could combine painting and drawing with my love of wildlife.

My work for the Margaret Senior Award focuses on the Wetlands not only because it is close by, but the subjects that I have chosen are mostly animals that I have contact with through wildlife rescue and are very familiar. In the future I would like to aim my work towards helping conservation of both wildlife and their habitat. It is said “a picture can tell a thousand words”, this is what I would like to accomplish, to educate about conservation.

Bronwyn King

Natural history illustration has opened my eyes to the possibilities available that I'd never even imagined. It allows me to be creative and yet have a strong purpose in an illustration, be it to provide knowledge or an idea or opinion. With the possibilities being endless my aims in the future are still so very broad, be it in scientific illustration, for publications or animation. However one main love has always been the illustration of children's books, and that is definitely a direction I would love to go into in the future.

In my work I have a passion to express great detail. I love to represent the intricacies of the natural world that often go unnoticed. Nature is such a beautiful and wondrous world and it is a great reward to try to portray and enhance those wonders to the public.

In such a way my Margaret Senior work focuses in animals in our urban environment. I wanted to make aware to people the beautiful common flora and fauna that is all around us, and how much our lives are intertwined with theirs. In exploring the relationship between an animal and its natural environment, I've come to question what a 'natural environment' really is. Many animals have adapted to use our environment over their traditional one. There are endless considerations to explore as to destruction of environments, creation of new environments and the relationship between increasing and decreasing species in our modern world.