Gill Gatfield is the winner of the prestigious 2026 Small Sculpture Prize for her work Tablet. Presented by Perpetual Guardian, the $5,000 non-acquisitive prize was announced at the exhibition opening event at Waiheke Art Gallery on Friday, 27 March. Gatfield writes of the work, ‘A sculpture still becoming, Tablet carries encoded passage—where secrecy is a structure. Fusing ancient stone and copper with algorithmic logic, a gold code unlocks an AI–AR totem tethered to its keyholder, a threshold held in suspense as aura. Equally treasure and tool, icon and index, Tablet imagines a future archive in a deep-time register.’

A total of 104 entries were received from across Aotearoa, with 29 works selected for the finalists’ exhibition.

Auckland artist Layla Walter won the Gallery Benefactor’s Merit Award for her work Layla Dahlia #3.

The Church Bay People’s Choice Award will be announced at the conclusion of the exhibition.

This year’s selector and judge was Deborah McCormick. She writes of the award winners;

‘Compact in scale yet architectonic in structure, Gatfield’s work brings stone, metal, code and virtual apparition into a single sculptural system. It's three elements: stone square, copper cube, and gold code unlock ideas around the day-to-day technology of a tablet, archive and screen imbued in the traditional sculptural material of Carrara marble. The inscribed Fibonacci-derived gold barcode lures us to seek out its meaning and decipher its code. The cooper cube beneath it is not just a pedestal but an open space to allow volume to move around the sculpture.’

‘Walter continues a tradition of cast glass, working with techniques which are highly skilled and complex, often using very personal representations of weaving or native flora and fauna carved in bas-relief. The form and scale of this piece are reminiscent of Ancient Greek Roman Pottery Vases, but in Walter’s case, the abstracted figures are replaced with bodily parts, an arm and hand cleverly rendered along with flowers to be viewed across her vase internally and externally. Her translucent materials allow for the shifting of light to bring into focus her forms and the exquisite rhubarb coloured gaffer glass.’

This year’s finalists are:  Josephine Backhouse, Gail Barratt, Lisa Bate, Maak Bow, Gavin Chai, Madeline Child, Deborah Crowe, Andrea Fashing, Margaret Feeney, Cat Fooks, Gill Gatfield, Volker Hawighorst, Paul Herbert, Julia Holden, Bella Christine Hessell, Lucy Hunter, Lauren Hunt, Claire Jensen, Stuart Jobling, Doug Marsden, Isla Osborne, Mary Schollum, Sally Smith, Torri Stewart, Oliver Stretton-Pow, Margaret Sumichl, Janna van Hasselt, Chris Wadsworth, and Layla Walter.