Five outstanding Australian visual artists will reach new creative heights through Australia Council for the Arts fellowships each worth $90,000 over the next two years.

The Australia Council visual arts fellowships provide support to craftspeople, designers, new media artists, visual artists and art writers of outstanding ability, enabling them to realise ambitious projects and develop their professional practise.

Australia Council director visual arts Anna Waldmann said: ‘These fellowships recognise a very high level of achievement in visual arts and are only granted once in an artist’s lifetime. ‘Australia Council support is a timely reward at this point in their careers. It will help build their already significant international and national reputations, and assist the artists to create exciting new works,’ Ms Waldmann said.

The visual arts fellowship recipients for 2006 are:

Susan Cohn – a Victorian craft artist who will research and develop work for exhibition at Anna Schwartz Gallery in Melbourne in 2007 and participate in the exhibition ‘Hybrids’ at the Art Gallery of South Western Manitoba in Canada in 2008.

Shaun Gladwell – the Sydney-based video artist will further develop new works for the Busan Biennale, the Sao Paulo Biennale and the Tokyo Wondersite exhibition in Japan.

Julie Gough – the Queensland artist will create sculptures and installations that explore issues relating to her home state Tasmania for a solo exhibition at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne in 2007. She will also complete residencies at several Australian art colleges, with the resulting works to be exhibited at Bett Gallery in Hobart in 2008.

Callum Morton – the Victorian artist will produce a body of prints, models and an animation based on a constructed virtual city, which will include roads, schools, hospitals and housing for installation in Melbourne and London in 2007.

Catherine Truman – the South Australian artist will research, create and document a series of works on the human body. Catherine will travel to the USA to access museum collections and complete a residency with Adelaide’s Restless Dance Company. This work will culminate in a solo exhibition at the Art Museum of the University of South Australia and the launch of a monograph in the next year.

All five artists are available for interview. Images of works are also available.