Marion Borgelt (b. 1954) grew up on a farm in the Wimmera district in western Victoria and attained her Diploma in Fine Art, majoring in painting, from the South Australian School of Art in 1976. She won the Harry P Gill Memorial Medal, awarded to the School's most outstanding final year student. She then gained a teaching qualification before winning the Peter Brown Memorial Travelling Art Scholarship, which funded her postgraduate study at the New York Studio School in 1979–1980. After returning to Australia, Borgelt taught at East Sydney Technical College, the Canberra School of Art, and the City Art Institute (now the UNSW College of Art and Design). Between 1989 and 1998 she lived and worked in Paris, where she undertook a French Government Art Fellowship and Residency and a collaboration with the Rene Taze etching atelier. Borgelt held her first solo exhibitions – of paintings and works on paper – in Adelaide in the 1970s, and from 1981 she began exhibiting regularly in Sydney and Melbourne. The first survey exhibition of her work was presented by the ANU's Drill Hall Gallery in 2010, and in 2016, Newcastle Art Gallery presented Marion Borgelt: Memory and Symbol. Among Borgelt's many prizes and residencies are the Fishers Ghost Art Award (for 1990 and 1992), the Kedumba Drawing Award (in 1994), and the Australia Council's Visual Arts Board grants in 1988, 1993, 1997 and 2006. In 1996, she became the first Australian recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award.
Interviewed in 2017, Borgelt cited her rural childhood as a consistent influence on her work, 'conceptually, as much as with materials. More than anything, just seeing the life cycles of all living things has influenced me. Everything that is alive will die. So, I am interested in memory and cycles and time', Borgelt said. Though trained as a painter, her practice encompasses a range of media including sculpture, installation and temporal works, and incorporates a variety of materials and processes: wood, bronze, wax, stone and glass, for example, and firing, carving and casting. Borgelt's major public and corporate commissions include 55 Ring Maze (1999–2000), a 1.5 hectare cornfield maze at Arthur's Seat, Victoria; Man's destiny resides in the sole (2005), a site-specific installation for the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, Canada; installations for hotels in Macau and Myanmar; Liquid Light: 63 degrees and Liquid Light: 64 degrees (2012) for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Washington DC; and Cascadence (2018) for Barangaroo, Sydney. Her work is held in the collections of Australia's major art museums, and in numerous other public, private and corporate collections here and overseas.
