BLAZE 2025
Canberra Contemporary is thrilled to launch the 2025 exhibition program with the return of the nigh-annual emerging artists showcase, BLAZE. Now in its fifteenth iteration, BLAZE proudly presents the diverse and dynamic voices of Kamberri/Canberra’s emerging talents: Sophia Childs, Sophie Dumaresq, Gabrielle Hall-Lomax, Emeirely Nucifora-Ryan, Brennan O’Brien and Jessika Spencer. We are thrilled to present these six artists at the beginning of their careers and offer an insight to the evolving art scene of the region and to exhibit bold and thought-provoking work across painting, installation, photography, weaving, performance and sculpture.
These artists were selected for their outstanding contribution to the vitality of visual art in the ACT region and on the merit of their outstanding exhibitions over the past 18 months at Canberra Glass-works, PhotoAccess, ANU School of Art and Design and Platform (formerly known as CCAS Manuka). With BLAZE, we have given these artists an opportunity to elevate their ambition, to expand their audience and to engage the Canberra Contemporary visitors and patrons with exciting new work.
the fabric are augmented by the coloured zig-zag stitch and loose threads. Sections are worked and reworked with pure acrylic colours, sometimes as if done by hand. These works are flayed out on the gallery walls like the hide of an animal, carefully pinned in such a way to achieve the best aspect. We see our own bodies at times in these fragments of garments and fear is struck for our own mortality. These works imply a body once occupied, now left to live a halflife within the gallery.
Sophia Childs explores the conventions and histories of abstract painting, using grotesque metaphors of zombies, monsters, mutants and the abject body. Working with flayed garments and intuitively reconstituting them across the deck of a sewing machine, these abstracted forms, derived from discarded items are reanimated with visceral applications of paint. Alluding to the appropriated fields of contemporary painting, her artworks are cut up and continuously reworked from numerous sources and various influences.
For BLAZE Childs presents a spread of brightly coloured, irregularly shaped fabric-paintings that engage textiles and sculpture. The inherent colours, textures and pattern of
Sophie Dumaresq is an interdisciplinary artist, consuming materials of all kinds to communicate to niche curiosities, elevating chatroom gossip, hobbyist mechanics, Tumblrcore, cinema folklore, environmental concerns and ecological idioms into wholly engaging performativesculptural installations.
Central to this microcosm is Dumaresq’s self-appointed position as the spokesperson for sympathy towards the Great White Shark. Her studio preoccupation of recent years has been to elevate the profile of the feared predator from that of the perfect killer to that of the perfect survivor. Poring over behind-the-scenes documentary photographs and drawing from the iconography of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), Dumaresq has built her own anthropomorphic sculptural-performative shark.
A smaller shark, Baby, was the object of Dumaresq’s endurance performance What’s in a postcard? Baby I just want to make you smile for the 2024 Canberra Art Biennial, creating a sympathetic relationship between human and shark, as Dumaresq pushed the exceedingly heavy sculpture up the steep grassy slopes at the National Arboretum. For BLAZE, Dumaresq is now inside the shark; no longer a faithful companion but an essential puppeteer, animating the movement of the jaw, eyes, fins and tail.
Image Sophie Dumaresq
Beached as bro... (I love you) 2025
Mixed media, mechanical components, durational performance; 150 x 550 x 150cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Gabrielle Hall-Lomax is a contemporary photographer who creates lucid scenes that transcend our quotidian experience. Using medium format film photography as her primary media and darkroom processing, her photographs are lustrous images full of intrigue. Hall-Lomax’s practice has multiple streams of inquiry: interrogating the embodied relationship between us humans and the natural environment. At times standing in front of the camera, Hall-Lomax’s photography becomes an autobiographical document considering the misunderstood nature of women’s health, and other explorations into the mechanical representation of our world through photography. Collaborating with her immediate family as both subjects and storytellers, Hall-Lomax’s scenes highlight the tension between memory’s fluid nature and photography’s fixed frame.
Presenting photos in considered sequences there are implied narrative elements to the work. Not only are HallLomax’s single photographs formally technical and refined compositions, the collective sequence and presentation of the works offers the audience an opportunity to occupy the scenes, enhancing the gravitas of the work. Using imagery associated with witchcraft and the occult, these photographs evoke something from beyond.
neon circles installed in grids, representing days circled on a calendar - one circle per day - with vacant spaces left in the grid, leaving a void where a circle wasn’t made.
For BLAZE Nucifora-Ryan continues to develop her hand in neon sculpture with Lorem Ipsum, a series of bent glass neon letters that are assembled and contorted to obscure and reveal themselves as one moves through the gallery. Switching from warm red to icy, argon-mercury blue, the beam of high voltage light dances within the complex of plumbing, brass instrument or rollercoaster like forms. The units are titled for the letters used to make each composition: K, O, S; L, B, J, C; R, M F, E; T, V, G, H; B, H, D, I; E, V, U, L.
Emeirely Nucifora-Ryan has worked in Canberra’s glass workshops at the School of Art and Design and the Canberra Glassworks for many years. Nucifora-Ryan’s work has taken multiple forms, as her acquisition of skill has progressed. Recently, her work received deserved recognition with the David Henshall Emerging Artist Prize at the 2024 FUSE Glass Prize, presented by the Jam Factory, Adelaide. Awarded for the artwork Processed, initially staged at Platform at the end of 2023, the entire space was washed with the red glow from red hand bent
Brennan O’Brien’s paintings exist on the verge of representation and abstraction, sometimes as if awash in heavy rainfall. The paintings explore softness and fluidity, absurdity and surrealism; the world is examined through an immersive lens that deceives any singular study, often creating dichotomies in a single work. O’Brien is interested in the hemispherical functions of the brain; intuitive brush strokes are used to depict taught and rational imagery.
O’Brien’s approach towards painting is fastidious; the beautifully modelled painting of a swan, a common symbol of love and fidelity, with its neck coiled and doubled over as if in the act of preening itself, and the unclothed androgynous human figure whose attention is beyond the frame. In contrast, the dark, imposing rendering of the neck-and-forequarter of a horse is cast in diminished light, to the point where the figure is barely legible. The final work is a powerful study in oil of a figure’s hands taken a work by Rembrandt; the Christ-like figure emerges from the brushwork and drapery, exaggerating the late brushwork of the Dutch Master on a much larger scale.
Image Emeirely Nucifora-Ryan
Lorem Ipsum (BLAZE installation detail) 2025
Glass, electrodes, argon-mercury, high voltage cable, transformer, acrylic, stainless steel, dimensions variable
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Jessika Spencer is a Wiradjuri woman who travels across the region, facilitating weaving and cultural workshops. Her artistic approach blends traditional fibre practices with contemporary forms of photography and installation. Embracing the slow and laborious process, Spencer ruminates on the diminishing landscape of her country.
Boneworks is a reimagining of country, a utopia free of the effects of colonisation, capitalism and patriarchy. The weaving is a cartographic map - complete with waterways, boundary markers and indications of sacred sites. This gives Spencer a spiritual opportunity to be in her ancestral homelands, whilst physically being a long way from them. Scattered beneath the woven wall hanging are kangaroo bones, gathered from roadkill while travelling on country. These bones are representative of the destruction of native fauna by encroaching colonisation. This arrangement is a shrine for the whole Indigenous community, facing violence, systematic displacement as acts as a signifier of the resilience and strength that remains.
It has been a pleasure to work alongside Alexander Boynes and the staff of Canberra Contemporary to produce this exhibition. The opening night of BLAZE 8 in February 2014 was the first exhibition I attended in Canberra, after relocating from Echuca, Victoria to attend the ANU School of Art. I had a camera shoved into my nose and a photo of a young, naive me appeared in the CCAS social pages the following week.
The leadership shown by Canberra Contemporary to produce these exhibitions is crucial in providing a platform for artists to establish successful, thriving careers and support sustainable art practices.
Benjamin Shingles
Assistant Curator ANU Art Collection, Drill Hall Gallery
Alexander Boynes
Curator and Program Manager Canberra Contemporary
Image Brennan O’Brein
I have tangled the only strings that hold me here 2024 Oil on acrylic primed canvas, 150 x 150cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Image Brennan O’Brein Cast from my broken limbs 2025 Oil on acrylic primed canvas, 150 x 180cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Bonework part 1 2025
Natural and studio
Bonework part 2 2025
Left Jessika Spencer
dyed raffia, hair, fishing line and timber frame, 140 x 75 x 3cm
Kangaroo bones, raffia and coolemon assemblage, 10 x 100 x 90cm
Right Gabrielle Hall-Lomax BLAZE installation 2025
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Image Gabrielle Hall-Lomax Twins 2025
Medium format film, scanned and printed on archival cotton rag, framed, 60 x 60cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Image Gabrielle Hall-Lomax Hands 2025
Medium format film, scanned and printed on archival cotton rag, framed, 60 x 60cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Image Emeirely Nucifora-Ryan
Lorem Ipsum (BLAZE installation detail) 2025
Glass, electrodes, argon-mercury, high voltage cable, transformer, acrylic, stainless steel, dimensions variable
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Image Sophia Childs BLAZE installation 2025
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Left Sophie Dumaresq
Beached as bro... (I love you) 2025
Mixed media, mechanical components, durational performance; 150 x 550 x 150cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Centre Brennan O’Brein
I have tangled the only strings that hold me here 2024
Oil on acrylic primed canvas, 150 x 150cm
Right Brennan O’Brein
Cast from my broken limbs 2025
Oil on acrylic primed canvas, 150 x 180cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Canberra Contemporary Art Space Incorporated is assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts funding and advisory body.
Canberra Contemporary acknowledges the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, the Traditional Custodians of the Kamberri/Canberra region, and recognises their continuous connection to culture, community, and Country.
