Australian of the Year trophies invites art to celebrate the nation's best

The council's chief executive, Jeremy Lasek, is calling for expressions of interest in designing the new batch of awards, and if your ears are pricking up at this news then you must get a wriggle on because you have only until July 31 to express your interest. The successful applicant is expected to be announced in August to allow design and production to get wriggling. Each year 36 trophies are presented to award recipients across all states and territories, and the 36 include the four national Australian of the Year, Senior Australian of the Year, Young Australian of the Year and Australia's Local Hero recipients.

It's a shame, we told Kristin McFarlane, that probably only the winners and those invited to get close to the winners' mantelpieces have ever had a good, close stickybeak at the McFarlane trophies. She laughs that, yes, the trophies are "in the paper for just one day" when pictures are published of happy recipients clutching them.

Examined up close, the glass trophies (some previous trophies have been of steel or bronze) are a turquoisey azure and this is, she says, "because Australia is surrounded by sea and because everyone who ever comes here is excited by how beautiful and clear the blue sky is". Then, there in the blueness, written in calligraphic script, there are the first two verses of the national anthem. There are Australian symbols and icons, including the Southern Cross.

Her trophies, given to four deserving souls in each state and territory, all have in the design something specific to the place and so, for example, the ACT trophies have an image of Parliament House and the Victorian trophies have Federation Square. She remembers that when, instinctively, she wanted to portray some churches for South Australia's Adelaide ("the city of churches") she was asked not to do that, presumably because the National Australia Day Council wanted the trophies to be inoffensively secular.

Those of you who submit your designs will surely have some icon juggling to do as you work out what to include and what to leave out of your compositions (though we insist that the Gang-gang cockatoo should get a guernsey in the ACT trophies). So, for example, McFarlane points out that she didn't include any human faces in her designs because we are so multicultural now it is hard to know exactly what is a representative Australian face.

Jeremy Lasek says those choosing the winning design are not likely to be "very prescriptive" about what it must and mustn't contain.

"In 55 years [since the awards began] we've gone from awarding a medallion or a certificate ... to awarding these days something that's unique and a piece of art,'' he said. ''So we like to think of artists rising to this challenge in their own ways. But we really are interested in the designs being as inclusive as possible [which, for example, he agrees might rule out having an image of Sir Don Bradman because there are Australians now who will ask "Don who?"] and that's one of the challenges for the artists."

Meanwhile, while we're sure no images of the rabbit will get a guernsey in the new designs (for rabbits are unAustralian and unpatriotic and have buggered up our otherwise idyllic land), we know there will be a rabbit, an unorthodox one (for a start its fine whiskers are made from horsehairs rescued from a discarded violin bow) in Mariana del Castillo's forthcoming Tuggeranong Arts Centre exhibition And I Stopped. She makes exquisite things and we've gushed her praises before here.

The artist, a haunter of tips, specialises in recycling and up-cycling discarded things. Haunting the tip at Mugga Lane, she found a plastic toy rabbit (it was broken in half) and has since upholstered it with the grey "fur" of an old army blanket and has given it a surreal strip of another creature's fur down its back using the fur collar of an old coat. The chair on which the rabbit is posed (the chair too has been re-upholstered with army blanket) was found tossed out and irresistibly orphaned lying on a verge beside a street in her own suburb in Queanbeyan.

She says that with recycling the core of her work she collects and hoards things. Her mother-in-law in Armidale, another collector, sent her the broken violin bow knowing her daughter-in-law would see its possibilities.

"I love making something from nothing. Winter coats, velvet curtains, mourning veils ... all transcend their domestic history; it is fundamentally women's business.”

We tried and tried to get her to spell out what the rabbit-rich work (it's called Hour Of Departure) means but she insists that most of her work is so very personal (and she has been through harrowing times lately including her first visit in 40 years to her home country of Ecuador) that explaining them would be "like opening up my diary" to strangers. Instead she invites us to harvest our own fancies about what we see.

And I Stopped opens at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre on July 3 and continues until August 2.