General News
24 March, 2026
Modern take on old art
A MAREEBA student was one of just 40 Queensland high schoolers to receive a Creative Generation Excellence visual art award recently and now has her work on display at a Brisbane gallery.
St Stephens’ Abigail Beckwith is shining as a young creative, with her project Anachronism: A Self Portrait – featuring clever modern twists on renaissance-era paintings – earning her just one of 40 Excellence awards out of a pool of over 470 submissions.
She now has her artwork on show at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane until 13 September, with an official exhibition launch set for this Saturday.
“I still can’t believe that I’ve had the opportunity for this collection to be showing in Brisbane for six months at the Gallery of Modern Art, and I can’t wait to go down for the exhibition launch,” Abigail said.
Abigail’s work featured at the annual ENERGY 2025 art exhibition in Cairns late last year, where she received her award.
“I was very surprised and felt very proud of myself for being recognised,” the now high school senior said.
“To see my work on show at an exhibition was surreal in a really good way.”
She said her project was an experimental artwork for a Year 11 Visual Art assessment at school.
“I had chosen renaissance as my theme for my assessment and the enquiry question that I created was, ‘How do contemporary artists replicate or modify renaissance painting techniques using modern materials’,” Abigail explained.
“When researching modern history artists, I stumbled upon Eleanor Antin who recreates historical moments. This inspired me to create my own, but instead of recreating, I modified well-known pieces of renaissance artwork and added myself in using Photoshop.
“I bought an outfit online and then I dressed up in a dress, heels, and a tiara. My mum helped me take the photos and my dad was a model, so I did the right poses.
“Then I added the images onto Photoshop and after tweaking them endlessly I settled on six out of eight possible images. After they were printed, they were put into golden ornate frames to make them look the part.”
Abigail’s parents, Mark and Jenny, were extremely proud of their daughter’s achievement.
“It was an unexpected opportunity to participate in the ENERGY 2025 student exhibition. It presents the best young and emerging artists of our region and for her to be recognised and to find out that her work would also be exhibited in Brisbane was a real privilege,” they said.
“The whole concept was quite unique, we couldn’t quite visualise what she was proposing initially and Abi had never use Photoshop before, so it was a huge learning curve with many hours of hard work to get the finish images. She was really passionate about the project and enjoyed the whole process.”
