Ryan Presley said winning the $100,000 Telstra Art Award with his painting - Our lifestyle of tranquillity undisturbed - would make a huge difference to his capacity to keep making art.
"I've only been an artist, and the margins to live on are often very tight," the Logan-based Marri Ngarr artist told AAP.
The winning work references the composition of Domenico Beccafumi's 16th century painting The Annunciation.
But instead of the Virgin Mary visited by the angel Gabriel, Presley's painting shows a figure lying near a rifle, as a bushfire smoulders on distant mountains.
The finalist artworks for the 2026 awards are on show at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, with the winners formally announced at a ceremony in Darwin on Friday evening.
Artists never forget succeeding at the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, guest curator Shannon Brett said.
"Your work has been recognised by your peers as being amongst the very best, which is an acknowledgement of you as an esteemed artist, a history maker," Brett told reporters earlier on Friday.
Napuwarri Marawili, from the NT community of Yilpara, won the Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award, now in its 40th year.
The work, Djambatj – Deadly hunter 2025, shows the reef heron totem of the Madarrpa, a prominent Yolŋu clan, and the artist explained the sculptures were created on sacred country.
"A big, strong story, knowledge area, and knowledge is still standing strong, and not falling down," he told AAP.
The $15,000 Work on Paper Award went to Jenna Mayilema Lee, for dillybags constructed from maps taken from the British Museum.
The visitor pamphlets are free but the museum requests a donation - the same sort of technicality used to justify its past collecting practices, Lee explained.
"I thought it was really cheeky to ask people for two pounds for a map to find their own objects, so I took a bunch," the Melbourne artist said.
"I think this is a really funny work. I find it deeply humorous, and I hope the British Museum finds it funny too."
Some of the to-scale dillybags of Taking back taken 2026 are made from pulp, others from collage, and some are even woven from string, painstakingly created from the maps.
The $15,000 Multimedia Award went to Colin Heenan-Puruntatameri, from Milikapiti in the Tiwi Islands, for a video aimed at giving new life to Tiwi performance culture.
The artist stopped painting several years ago to focus on working at Wurrungura, the digital archive and media centre at Jilamara Arts, preserving culture by digitising slides and scanning old photos.
Seeing old videos inspired him to make new work, to keep stories, songs and dance alive, said Heenan-Puruntatameri.
In Ngirramini Ngini Amparruwu (The story of the widow) 2026, the artist performs the widow dance, as well as a chant created by his mother.
"In this current generation, nobody dances with fighting sticks anymore, and even the chanting, the singing that I did (in the video), there's only a handful of elders that do sing," he said.
Alice Springs artist Vanessa Inkamala won the General Painting Award with Arrkurla Nukala / Lyaarta Ntema 2026, which means "before" and "after/today".
Painted on recycled road signs, it shows two views of the West MacDonnell Ranges - the first simply looking, and the second viewed through mobile phone cameras.
* AAP travelled to the awards with the assistance of event organisers.
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