The Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize is an annual acquisitive prize with the purpose of advancing art and opportunity for emerging and established women artists in Australia.
 

“If paradise were to exist, all its spiders would be artists. They would sing, dance and make beautiful pictures. The Actual Size series features the colourful courtship displays of minuscule Australian jumping spiders. They are surely the world’s smallest artists. Magnified hundreds of times their own size, we perceive all the magnificent colours, diverse structures and mesmerising patterns that the males have perfected to seduce their hard-to-get females. […] The virtuosity of the spider’s display has been made visible to the human eye by compiling around 900 individual photos taken at 30 microns. Using computer software, we stack them into one single perfectly-focussed image. What we can’t see, we can’t appreciate.” - Maria Fernanda Cardoso

Pictured: María Fernanda Cardoso, ‘Actual Size V (Maratus Madelineae)’, 2021, Pigment print on premium photo paper 300gsm, focus stacked from 825 source images