Currently working in Canberra, Ms Willis studied at the South Australian School of Art, and the Australian National University, where she graduated with First Class Honours from the Glass Workshop in 2010.

Describing her winning piece, a 90-centimetre diameter wall-hung dome, the artist says, “Through its ability to compress, reflect, and reinterpret space, ‘float’ glass has had a tremendous impact on the way we interact with, and observe our surroundings.”

“Resonance IV investigates and highlights the qualities of this fascinating, and ubiquitous building material in modern architecture; and examines how it can alter our perceptions of the environment around us.”

The winning piece will now be acquired for the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery’s National Art Glass Collection.

Ms Willis will receive a fully paid residency at North Lands Creative Glass in Scotland, one of the world’s most prestigious centres for the study and development of glass art.

LAND Dialogues has been curated by James Farley and Christopher Orchard, and includes works by Renata Buziak, Amy Findlay, Christine McFetridge, Jacob Raupach, Kate Robertson, Felix Wilson and Carolyn Young.

The exhibition is presented in conjunction with the inaugural Land Dialogues Conference, hosted by Charles Sturt University – a three-day exploration of interdisciplinary attitudes to place and space.

The changing relationship to the country and its multifarious environments and cultures as a process of colonisation has seen Australia described as a landscape of encounter.

Land Dialogues aims to highlight that a country's character is not static, but protean.

As our multicultural composition shifts and relationships to land develop over time our national character and perceptions of what it means to be Australian exhibits incredible potential for change; and in the shadow of anthropogenic climate change, this becomes an obligation.

Discussing the exhibition, the curators have stated, “The physical properties of the land remain primary drivers in shaping a contemporary Australian national and cultural identity, and the Land Dialogues exhibition responds to the contemporary shifting politics of national identity where it is informed by emergent discourse in relationship to place. Whereas early Australian depictions of land followed the aesthetic modes of the sublime and picturesque imported with early European settlers and these modes predominated in early photographs of the Australian landscape, Land Dialogues suggests new ways of interacting or engaging with land.”

In conjunction with this exhibition and the Land Dialogues Wagga Wagga Art Gallery is also proud to present a recent major new media work by Mitchell Whitelaw, Drifter.

This fascinating work, which poses the question, ‘How might we read a landscape through data?’, constructs a constantly changing portrait of a river system out of tens of thousands of data points: scientific observations, newspaper articles, maps, images and audio.