Creative awarded for VR work

A VISUAL artist working within the realm of virtual and augmented reality has won big in this year’s QLD XR Festival late last month.

Stefanie Petrik, who works under the pseudonym ReVerse Butcher, was one of two entrants to receive the Best in Digital Art award for her VR piece Circle Series: Feminine with Perfect UnBalance.

She said the piece is part of a wider body of work aimed at capturing the presence of the virtual space.

“They’re sort of meditations on embodiment,” she said.

“You’re in a virtual space when you’re making it, so you feel almost in a liminal space or dream space. You’re making something tangible and solid but you can’t reach out and touch it.

“Those kinds of liminal creative spaces really interest me. It’s a feminist work as well.

“I prefer to sculpt female bodies because there are a lot of male sculptures.”

Petrik’s award-winning piece was splayed across the screen at Brisbane’s King George Square, with the category accolade split between her entry and Sydney-based creative TellandTales.

Feminine with Perfect UnBalance was previewed locally as part of Obscura Cameras’ opening exhibition in August, alongside two other works in her Circle Series.

Petrik is no stranger to the QLD XR Festival, having previously won in the same category each year since 2021 with her Circle Series pieces.

The series of works began in 2018 as Petrik’s first foray into virtual reality artmaking after being introduced to the discipline after about two decades as a literary and 2D visual creative.

“All the figures I make in the Circle Series are interacting with the circle in some way,” she said. “It’s the unifying motif between them.

“In the case of Perfect UnBalance, it’s all about the precarious sense of trying to step up.

“She’s frozen in motion almost like in a circus pose where she’s balancing her body in a very awkward way but it happens to look graceful in the same sense.”

Beginning work on the project late last year, Petrik virtually sculpted the piece by hand using the Open Brush program, and utilised vintage paper sourced from old encyclopaedias and books as textures.

“I’ll then use acrylic inks and paints mostly and create visual poems, turn them into 3D textures and apply them to the sculpture,” she said.

Petrik was also a double finalist in the Digital Art Category with her work, Circle Series: Feminine with Hooked Finger.