3rd Prize Winner, MPB Photography Award Winners 2026

Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize 2026

Samantha Everton

Title:

“Suite of Desire” 

Medium & Dimensions:

Digital photography: 1/160 @ F11 – 35mm Lense – ISO400 – Sony ILCE 7RM3). Cake design: Bakey Bakes

About the Artist

Samantha Everton is a fine art photo-artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her photographs are endowed with curiosity, placing female subjects in theatrical scenes with carefully curated stages, built sets and handmade props full of colour with elements of whimsy. Samantha Everton’s tightly choreographed photographs create visual narratives that have profound cross-cultural, sociological and psychological implications. The artist’s vivid style, described as ‘magic realism’, has a cinematic and surreal quality that pushes her subjects further and further from reality. They inhabit an uncanny world that is at once familiar and foreign, real and symbolic, and it feels as though our forgotten dreams have been projected into the picture plain. The unerring integrity of Everton’s photographic processes and her masterful technical ability have been internationally acclaimed.

“Suite of Desire”: Suite of Desire is created through a staged, surreal tableaux, a 13 year old navigates a familiar domestic interior, overwhelmed by spectacle – bejewelled foods, cult toys, oversized insects, and fantastical animals inhabit domestic spaces like unwelcome inheritances. The image presents a world saturated with objects: glittering, ornamental, and irresistibly abundant. Cakes lusciously melt, jewels encrust everyday items, & playful icons of childhood swell to monstrous scale. The child becomes both witness and participant, embodying the perspective of a generation within a culture of relentless consumption. We ask what it means to inherit such a world – one where beauty, desire, and excess blur together – and quietly question what remains when accumulation becomes our dominant legacy.