Sydney artist Loribelle Spirovski has won the 2025 Portia Geach Memorial Award People’s Choice with her portrait of acclaimed Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin, titled Fingerpainting of Elena at Work.

The $1,000 People’s Choice Award, presented at Sydney’s S.H. Ervin Gallery, is given in memory of Harry and Winifred Macorison by Dr Heather Macorison and Ms Hilary Macorison.

Fingerpainting of Elena at work. Portrait by Loribelle Spirovski

Spirovski, a recent Archibald Prize People’s Choice winner for her portrait of musician-composer William Barton, said the Portia Geach honour was particularly meaningful, marking a long-awaited creative collaboration with Kats-Chernin.

“This portrait of composer Elena Kats-Chernin is a long-awaited collaboration between us,” Spirovski said. “I painted it mostly with my fingers – a technique I turned to after a chronic nerve injury made brushwork painful. What began as necessity became something truer: a more physical, immediate way of painting that feels closer to how I see and respond to the world.”

The work depicts Kats-Chernin in her studio, surrounded by manuscripts, papers and fragments of sound “waiting to be shaped”. Spirovski said she aimed to...