2025 people’s choice prize and Special Commendation Award
‘the churchie’ is excited to announce the winner of the 2025 People’s Choice Prize and Special Commendation — Jack Hodges
Jack Hodges came second in the main prize award receiving $5,000 for Special Commendation. Sponsored by Hutchinson Builders, the $3,000 People’s Choice also includes a School Art Supplies product pack valued at $500.
Jack Hodges is a multidisciplinary artist based on Gumbaynggirr Country in Nambucca Heads, NSW. His practice centres on the intersection of materiality, place, and social critique. He is interested in everyday aesthetics, local culture, and the deeper truths revealed through irony and imperfection. Hodges seeks to shed light on the quiet forces influencing our daily lives: coercion, convention, coexistence, and status, prompting reflection on how these pressures guide our decisions. Hodges completed a Master of Community Development in 2020, informing his use of problem-posing methods to generate dialogue and reinterpret public interactions into artworks.
Coincidently with an artwork titled, People’s Choice, the work is a response to the growing polarisation across political, cultural, and social spheres. At a time when echo chambers dominate both digital and real-world spaces, this work asks: What stops those seeking meaningful change from engaging with contrasting perspectives? Rather than providing answers, the project facilitates conversation to interrogate thought, embracing uncertainty over certainty, curiosity over conviction.
At its heart is a 21-minute film, following Gary the Dolphin, a laid-back human-porpoise hybrid, embodying the existential paradox of freedom. As a silent witness to deeply held assumptions, he serves as a medium for collective reasoning. Gary is a figure caught between worlds, land and sea, urban and rural. As someone who’s never left Nambucca Heads, his identity is shaped not just by place, but by the people he encounters.
Gary’s car, a wrecked cardboard Ferrari Testarossa, stands as a monument to the illusion of freedom and the fragility of control. A symbol of speed, status, and individualism now rendered still and broken, a collision of desire and consequence. Does one truly steer their own life, or are they being driven in directions out of one’s control?
People’s Choice is the first in a 3-part series, exploring how beliefs are formed, held, and challenged. Episode 1 focuses on individual freedom and the boundaries of choice. The series invites the public to reflect on the forces shaping everyday decisions, not in isolation, but in relation to each other.
Congratulations to Jack, who received this prize based on votes by gallery visitors during the two weeks of the finalists’ exhibition.
Image: ‘People’s Choice’, 2025. Cardboard, acrylic paint, liquid nails, packing tape, video on loop, USB, TV screen, speakers, 105 x 187 x 431cm. Photography by Dan McCabe.
