Announcement│Evan Webb Award for Len Lye Research 2026 – Winner

The Len Lye Foundation is delighted to announce the winner of the 2026 Evan Webb Award for Len Lye Research: Shannon Novak

Novak is a New Zealand artist of Croatian descent based in Auckland. He trained at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland and held an artist residency at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre in 2023. His practice spans installation, sculpture, painting, and digital work, with abstract compositions of colour, shape, and sound at its core – creating works that draw people into direct engagement with space.

Roger Horrocks, a Trustee of the Len Lye Foundation, commented:

The annual Evan Webb Award is proof that art of Len Lye continues to excite researchers, both from New Zealand and from overseas. Over the years the award has been won by a wide range of applicants, including art students, art historians, and established artists. This year’s winner, Shannon Novak, is well-known as an artist, but he is a prize-winner on this occasion not for his art but for his writing, which was an excellent analysis of the sun image in Lye’s work. Shannon’s essay includes some original discoveries in terms of 1910s newspaper coverage.

Lye worked in many fields, and this year’s entries for the Award ranged across his films, sculptures and paintings.  As well as creating new insights into Lye’s body of work, the Award serves to honour the memory of Evan Webb, the sculptor who served for many years as the Director of the Len Lye Foundation. Based in Christchurch, Webb was both an imaginative artist and a brilliant technician, a combination which perfectly suited the unique nature of Lye’s kinetic art.