10 Canberra artists to watch: Part Three
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Canberra has some amazing artists and talent — here, local creative Maddie Hepner shares 10 more you need to watch.
The Canberra arts scene is one where I have always felt at home. I truly think it’s one of the city’s biggest assets. I have made countless friends, connections, and collaborations through this scene alone. I have grown tenfold as an artist, arts worker, and writer, and this does not exist in a vacuum.
Inspired by the recent Canberra Times list of 30 under 30 – a list highlighting young Canberrans excelling in their fields – as well as in response to Canberra vying for UNESCO recognition as a City of Design, and out of my utmost love and respect for the community that has shaped me into who I am, I’ve created my own list of 30 Canberra-based visual artists and practitioners to watch.
Because this talent needs to be recognised at all levels.
Artistic careers need to be uplifted — not only at the emerging stages, but at the crucial stages of mid-career and beyond. There needs to be better spotlights, funding opportunities, exposure and experiences.
Listed alphabetically, I hope this three-part series is a small step towards that. You can read Part One here and Part Two here.
Chin-Jie Melodie Liu
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Chin-Jie Melodie Liu 劉沁潔 is a Taiwanese and American emerging artist, curator and writer based in Kamberri (Canberra, Australia). Her interdisciplinary practice is informed by her heritage and focuses on contested histories and collective memory. She is interested in varying forms of creative collaboration and the use of text as visual material.
Liu has received numerous awards, including the Emerging Arts Support Scheme Patrons Honours Scholarship and the Gray Smith and Joan Scott Prize.
In 2024, Liu was a Curationist Fellow and participated in the National Gallery of Australia’s Young Writers Digital Residency.
Sarah Murray
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Sarah Murray is a Canberra-based artist, working on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country. Murray primarily works in painting and drawing, using acrylic and oils, large scale surfaces (including public murals), vibrant colours and expressive mark-making. Murray creates a balance between representation and abstraction. Murray’s work explores the embodied experience of landscape, seeking to describe a physical connection to space and place. Additionally, in recent work Murray has been exploring themes of the sublime, spirituality and sin. Since graduating with first-class honours from the ANU School of Art and Design in 2021, Murray has participated in various exhibitions across Canberra, interstate, and internationally.
Nathan Nhan
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Nathan Nhan (b. 1997, Canberra, ACT) is a ceramicist whose practice uses experimental making and the ceramic process as a tool to create, investigate and manifest identities within his work. Responding to the inherent materiality and cultural significance of ceramics, Nhan reflects upon concepts of place, community and identity from an Asian Australian perspective. He often employs traditional vessels as a foundation, transforming historical forms into contemporary vehicles that play with the medium’s enduring epic narrative of both Eastern and Western perspectives imbued with personal stories and social commentary.
Nathan currently lives and works in Canberra, ACT. Nathan’s representation with KSGoW commenced in 2025.
Emeirely Nucifora-Ryan
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Emeirely Nucifora-Ryan is a neon artist whose practice is grounded in technical discipline and process-based inquiry. A graduate of ANU’s Glass program (2018), she has since become known for her exploration of repetition, precision, and craft as modes of introspection.
Her major installation Processed (2023) was featured in New Glass Review 44, and she was the winner of the 2024 Fuse Glass Prize (Emerging category). Emeirely currently works from ANCA studios on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land.
In her practice, Emeirely often sets deliberate constraints to guide the development of new technical skills. Her work uses neon’s intense materiality to meditate on discipline, emotional containment, and the transformative nature of slow mastery. The resulting installations are rhythmic, glowing testaments to the process of becoming.
Claudia Ridgway
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Claudia Ridgway indulges in fantastical self portraiture using oil paint, drawing and sculpture. Claudia’s compositions aim to explore and share her inner world by accentuating the idiosyncrasies of self identity. The anthropomorphised, mythological or exaggerated characters stare you down from within warped scenes; relaying stories and wisdom through their gaze. Since receiving her Bachelor in Visual Art from ANU in 2020 and an Honours in Fine Art from RMIT in 2022, Claudia has been involved in multiple exhibitions, both solo and group shows across Melbourne (Naarm) and Canberra (Ngunnawal).
Litia Roko
Litia Roko is an artist working across video, installation, text, and presentation software. Her practice examines the ways value, authority, and labour are produced and managed in algorithmic culture, with a particular interest in the politics of photographic representation. In 2024, Roko graduated from the ANU School of Art and Design with First Class Honours and received the Peter and Lena Karmel Anniversary Prize in Art. She has exhibited across Australia and internationally and was an artist in residence at Canberra Contemporary and M16 Artspace in 2025. She lives and works on unceded Ngunawal and Ngambri country.
Lani Shea-An
Lani Shea-An (she/her) is an early career artist living and working on beautiful Ngunawal and Ngambri Country.
She makes quasi-abstract paintings which incorporate mixed media collage with oil, acrylic, ink, watercolour, and pencil. Imagery shifts from representational to abstract. In her works, landscapes break apart and morph into indeterminable spaces. It is in the rupture of the landscape that she tries to describe herself and her experience of being in the world.
Lani works from her studio at M16 Artspace in Griffith.
Elise Stanley
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Elise Stanley is an artist based on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land (Canberra). She graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) in Printmedia & Drawing from the Australian National University. Elise is deeply engaged in Canberra’s arts community not only through her practice, but also as a passionate arts worker.
Her practice is grounded in exploring personal experiences of femininity, vulnerability, and autonomy, using drawing and printmaking as a means to navigate the complexities of the body and lived experience. Through layered mark-making, repetition, and experimentation with process, Elise creates works that lends equal weight to both fragility and strength.
Florence Steel
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Florence Steel is an emerging visual artist working predominantly on Ngunawal/Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country (Canberra).
Through symbolic oil painting and multi-media installation, Florence explores personal and cultural relationships to the universe. Their work sits at the intersection of art history, metaphysics, and cosmology, referencing established and emerging iconographic languages. Through their practice, Florence pushes the boundaries of representation, exploring how knowledge is constructed and deconstructed through symbolic processes.
Steel is currently completing their Honours in Visual Arts at ANU.
Image courtesy of the artist. Microcosm Macrocosm, oil on canvas, 2025
Jackson Taylor
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Jackson Taylor (b. 2000, Figtree NSW) is a faux-naïve figurative genre painter whose practice centres on an ongoing fascination with shared experience and the human condition. Working primarily in painting, Taylor explores everyday moments as sites of quiet tension, humour, and familiarity. His works are characterised by flattened geometric picture planes, elongated limbs, and scenes drawn from the in-betweens of life.
From logos, domestic and public settings to the subtle body language of his figures – Jackson uses each detail as a tool to evoke viewers to recognise themselves within the narratives depicted.
Jackson has recently become represented by King Street Gallery on William in 2025 & his first exhibition is scheduled for April 2026.
