With little more than a pencil and paper, Ainsley Wilcock has captured the poignancy of her young brother’s “burgeoning awareness of his hemiplegic cerebral palsy”.          

His struggle with the condition that has affected an arm and leg on one side of his body was the inspiration behind Half a boy.           

The drawing was one of the final works Ainsley submitted for her HSC last year, and the winner of the Integral Energy Award for Excellence in this year’s ARTEXPRESS.          

The former Wollongong High School of Performing Arts’ student wrote in a state-ment that the work’s title “is a reference to the time I heard him say … ‘Mummy, I’m only half a boy’.”          

“My drawings glimpse my brother’s private struggle and aim to challenge the perception, or perhaps the preference, that children with a disability are one-dimensional people who easily accept their situation,” Ainsley wrote.          

Launching ARTEXPRESS last month, NSW Minister for Education and Training Verity Firth paid tribute to the “sophistication of thinking” on display.          

“The quality of the work is a testament to both excellence in student achievement and quality teaching by the state’s visual arts teachers,” Ms Firth said.          

ARTEXPRESS features 310 student works chosen from pieces submitted by 9,665 students for the HSC visual arts examination.          

The exhibition will be shown in 10 locations throughout metropolitan and regional NSW this year.          

For another exhibitor, former Moruya High student Ben Radburn, a philanthropic visit to a women’s jail in the Philippines was an unlikely source of inspiration.          

“They recycle all the rubbish around them. They break all the plastic and paper into these thin strips and weave these amazing pieces, which they sell from the jail,” Ben says.          

His submission, Passed quarantine, incorporates recycled letters from his new penpals into his sculptures that include representations of flowers and birds.          

But he has Australian Customs to thank for his choice of work title.          

“One of [the prisoners] sent me this really innocent Christmas card, with a music box [which] had been disassembled, broken apart by customs,” Ben says. “It had a big sticker on it ‘Passed quarantine’, which had really taken the innocence away, so I started thinking about symbols of freedom and captivity.”           

He says the women at the jail were just as excited as he was when they learned his work had been selected for ARTEXPRESS.          

“They were passing [the phone] along from person to person, secretly – and I eventually got on to them, and they were just screaming, and crying and singing,” he says.