Olsen Irwin Artist Sophie Cape has won the Geelong acquisitive print award Sophie Cape?s work The devil?s firmament 2014, merges abstraction and figuration and is inspired by external landscapes and the internal workings of the mind. Printed in collaboration with master printer John Loane (himself a winner of the Geelong print prize in 1972), the unique state etching employs the techniques of spit-bite (when acid is dropped or spattered onto the plate) and foul-bite (when an etching ground collapses and allows the acid to attack the plate indiscriminately), as well as carborundum, charcoal, oil, collage, shellac and soil. The vitality of the mark-making and the vibrancy of select passages, contrast with darker sections while the inclusion of a representation of a human skull?a symbol of the transience of life?is a poignant contrast to the energy and physicality of the work itself