Fyshwick artist Margaret Hadfield has carried off the $6000 SOHO Art Prize for 2025.

This year’s prize theme is Water, of which the Sydney gallery says, “the world’s largest island continent, it plays a dual role in sustaining life and driving our nation’s unique character.”

Fitting that theme perfectly, Hadfield’s winning work, The Splash of Light, in acrylic on canvas, was inspired in part by her Dutch seafaring ancestry and also by an art-teaching cruise around South America and Antarctica, which, she says, provided “the perfect combination for focusing on the magical light on the sea”.

The SOHO Art Prize is non-acquisitive, which means a winning artist is free to sell their work – this one comes with a price tag of $7700.

Best known as the inaugural winner of the Gallipoli Art Prize in 2006, Hadfield was also the founder of the Artists’ Shed in Fyshwick.

​The finalists’ works will be on public display at SOHO galleries 150 Edgecliff Road, Woollahra, until March 22.