Art lecturer Troy Ruffels has been awarded one of Australia’s most significant prizes for conceptual photography.
Dr Ruffels has won the $30,000 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize in New South Wales.
He took the top prize with Architectures of Connection, a work that draws inspiration from the ballooning behaviour of spiders, transforming a paddock into what Dr Ruffels describes as a “fragile topography of peaks and troughs”.
“The work is motivated by a desire to make visible forms of connection that usually escape perception,” Dr Ruffels said.
“It asks how photography might use the delicate and easily overlooked to render visible the larger, unseen structures of interdependence that connect bodies, environments and communities, revealing a world shaped by fragile yet resilient acts of connection.”
Dr Ruffels has exhibited in Australia and internationally in 35 solo and over 200 group shows in more than a dozen countries, and is the recipient of a long list of awards, prizes and commissions.
His photography and paintings are held in private and public collections nationally and internationally, and locally by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Queen Victorian Museum and Art Gallery, Devonport Regional Gallery, Burnie Regional Gallery, the University of Tasmania and State Government Collections. This year, he installed a suite of major works at the House of Assembly in Hobart.
A first-in-family graduate from north-west Tasmania, he completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) and PhD at the University of Tasmania.
Now in its eighth year, The Australian Photographic Society’s Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize is a national $30,000 acquisitive prize that seeks to find Australia’s best conceptual photographic works.
“It means a great deal for the work to be recognised and the prizemoney enables investment in some ambitious projects that are underway,” Dr Ruffels said.
View the finalists in the 2026 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize.