New South Wales-based artist Harrie Fasher has won the 2026 Sculpture by the Sea prize in Sydney, taking the AUD 70,000 Aqualand Sculpture Award for her work Unveiling the Edges of the Sky. The prize, worth around USD 49,200, was announced as part of the annual outdoor exhibition along the Bondi to Tamarama coastal walk.

Fasher is the fourth woman to win the award in the 30-year history of the prize. Her winning work is a six-by-five-metre web-like construction of steel, bronze and timber, installed on the clifftop walk. According to the artist, the abstract sculpture explores female strength and intuition, along with the disintegration of the ego, themes she has pursued across large-scale installations and smaller works alike.

The sculpture joins 99 other works by local and international artists in this year's edition of Sculpture by the Sea, spread across two kilometres of coastline and Marks Park. First held in 1997, the exhibition has grown from a small local initiative into a fixture of Sydney's cultural calendar, and its sculpture prize is now one of the most valuable awards for public art in Australia. The exhibition, one of the largest free public sculpture shows in the world, turns the Bondi to Tamarama walk into an open-air gallery each spring, drawing large crowds to the eastern Sydney shoreline.

Fasher is known for monumental outdoor pieces that combine industrial materials with organic, bodily forms. Unveiling the Edges of the Sky continues that approach on a grand scale, using steel and bronze to build a structure that reads as both a net and a threshold. The outdoor exhibition remained open to the public through 2 November.