If artist Lori Pensini is not wearing her cattle boots, she can usually be found with paintbrush in hand at her home studio.

Along with her husband Warren, the couple has farmed their South West sustainable regenerative agricultural property, Blackwood Valley Beef, in Boyup Brook for more than two decades, having both come from a rural background.

Born in Narrogin, Pensini spent her early years on her family’s Yilliminning farm in WA’s Wheatbelt before meeting Warren when she was 19 years old, moving up to work as a jillaroo on his family’s Wyloo cattle station on the Pilbara’s Hamersley Range.

“That’s where I started my journey back into art because when I was little, art back in the 1970s wasn’t considered a profession,” Pensini explains.

“My family were really poor. They didn’t go to school, so it was really important that you had some sort of job with social standing. Art wasn’t one of those jobs so I had to hide it, and I was ashamed of it. I wasn’t academic because I’m dyslexic and (have) ADHD. I really tried hard at school, but art came easier for me; that was my language.

“I’m a narrative figurative artist. I tell stories, and I come from a long line of European and Indigenous cultures . . . I’m an eighth-generation grazier, so it is those handed-down stories of working in the Australian bush that I draw from, and then also my lived experience of being on farm, then station and back on farm.”

Accustomed to the hardship of farm life that comes with drought from her time in the Pilbara still did little to prepare Pensini for the challenges of 2023-24 when parts of South West WA recorded its driest summer on record.

Shocked that the region could even experience such a dry spell, Pensini watched the forest bleaching as jarrahs died, dams dried up, there was no feed in the paddock and sheep farmers had to choose between lambs or ewes because they could not look after both.

“At the beginning, you were trying to save everything and at the end, you knew you physically couldn’t,” she recounts.

Pensini took a photo of sheep farmer and her close friend Kirsten holding an orphaned lamb at the beginning of the drought, turning it into oil on linen artwork Bare Earth, that went on to win the $50,000 Collie Art Prize 2025.

Cited as advocating for the resilience of rural women and a testimony to the fabric of bush communities, the painting addressed the theme of identity in the major biennial, national acquisitive contemporary visual art award held at Collie Art Gallery.

“I love the theme of identity because it can cross so many genres and mediums,” the mother-of-two says.

“I had to go with what I was experiencing, which was a drought at the time. That doesn’t only affect me, it affected my family and our community at large . . . I couldn’t not paint it.

“I’m not painting an observation, I’m painting the lived experience.”

Thrilled to have Bare Earth feature in a curated selection of finalist works, chosen by an independent panel for Collie Art Prize 2025, Pensini says she never dared to dream of winning the main prize.

It still feels like an unbelievable and surreal experience to her as she delightfully recalls how events unfolded on the awards night.

“I was actually sitting on the floor with the catalogue and was so tired because we were burning the midnight oil,” she says.

“My husband was standing up as they were going through the other prizes. They gave you a little bit of a description of each winning painting with a couple of clues. I was flicking through with my little notebook like a TAB form, trying to work out who was going to win each section.

“I was looking through the artists that I had earmarked as possible winners and missed my name completely, while Warren jumped up and down, laughing and trying to pick me up off the floor.

“I’d thought that they actually let the winners know beforehand, but no, they don’t.”

Pensini says winning Collie Art Prize 2025 has helped her look at her work in a more critical way, using it as a good educational tool for the artistic merit in her artwork going forward.

As entries open on October 5 for Collie Art Prize 2027, which has additional category prizes and community awards alongside the acquisitive major award, she supports other artists to back themselves and stop being their hardest critic.

“Be kind on yourself and learn from it,” she adds.

“If it does get in, perhaps look at why it might have been chosen. What I do love about the art prize is having a look at the stable of artists that are there, the group of your artistic cohorts. Have a look at their quality and look at it critically about why you got in, and how you fit in. It’s really lovely.”

Entries to Collie Art Prize 2027 close December 11. Collie Art Prize 2027 is at Collie Art Gallery, February 20 to March 28. More at collieartgallery.org.au.