2008 Judges

Edmund Capon, AM, OBE
Edmund Capon has been director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales since 1978. For five years before leaving London he held the position of assistant keeper, Far Eastern Section at the Victoria & Albert Museum, having started there in 1966 in the Textile Department (specialising in Chinese textiles and costume, and European tapestries). He has also managed a commercial gallery in London primarily concerned with modern British paintings and sculpture. He obtained his Master of Philosophy degree in Chinese art and archaeology (including language) from the London University School of Oriental and African Studies, and also studied 20th-century painting at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London University.

Mr Capon is recognised as a world expert in his particular field and has published several books and catalogues including Princes of jade (1974); Art and archaeology in China (1977); Qin Shihuang: terracotta warriors and horses (1982); and Tang China: vision and splendour of a golden age (1989), as well as many articles for Australian and international newspapers and professional art journals. In 1994 Mr Capon was made a member of the Order of Australia and in 2000 was awarded a Doctor of Letters (honoris casua) from the University of New South Wales and a Chevalier of Arts and Letters from the French government. He is also a member of the Advisory Council of the Asia Society AustralAsia Centre and a member of the Council of Australian Art Museum Directors (CAAMD).

Deborah Edwards
Deborah Edwards was the first assistant curator of Australian art at Queensland Art Gallery, working there 1980-84 until returning to Sydney to begin post-graduate studies and tutor at Sydney University. Joining the Art Gallery of NSW in 1986, she became a curator and subsequently Senior Curator of Australian art. She specialises in 20th century art and has a strong interest in Australian sculpture. She has lectured and published widely and is the author of monographs on sculptors Lyndon Dadswell, Rayner Hoff and Robert Klippel, and painters Godfrey Miller and Margaret Preston.

She has mounted many exhibitions, including Stampede of the Lower Gods. Classical mythology in Australian art (1989), Australian sculpture 1890s-1910 (1990), the Godfrey Miller retrospective (1996), Rosalie Gascoigne: Material as Landscape (1998) and Rayner Hoff and his school (1999), and initiated the popular Australian Art Collection Focus series. Recent major exhibitions include the Robert Klippel retrospective (2002), Presence and Absence: Portrait sculpture in Australia (National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 2003) and the Margaret Preston retrospective (2005).

"It will be an enormous pleasure to judge the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize again. My experience with this exhibition has been of a wonderfully diverse field, where the constraint placed on entries in terms of size has never had an effect on the scale of sculptors' ambitions. This is always a sculpture exhibition to look forward to in Sydney."

Biographies from the Art Gallery of New South Wales