Luke Cornish (ELK)

Luke Cornish, also known as ELK, took up stencil art as a hobby in the early 2000s while working as a sign painter and landscape designer. He sprays paint through cut layers of recycled acetate, creating figurative compositions that sometimes feature hundreds of colors. After winning the Australian Stencil Art Prize in 2010, Cornish was the first street artist to become a finalist for the Archibald Prize in portraiture in 2012. For the show, he created a stencil portrait in grayscale of Father Bob Maguire, a Catholic priest who was controversially forced to resign. Cornish’s acrylic painting of Maguire sold at auction for $24,637 in 2013, breaking the record for an Australian street artist. Cornish’s work does not shy away from politicized subject matter, featuring imagery related to war, religion, and societal conflict.