10 Canberra artists to watch: Part One
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Canberra has some amazing artists and talent — here, local creative Maddie Hepner shares 10 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.
Cassie Abraham
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Cassie Abraham currently lives and works in Kamberri/Canberra on Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri land. Her photographic practice is an ongoing exploration and celebration of the banal found in new people, places and day-to-day life. She considers her work to be observational “short stories”, playfully exploring the relationship between strangers, loved ones, objects and the viewer.
Cassie graduated with an Advanced Diploma in Photography from Photography Studies College in 2013. She lived in Stockholm Sweden for five years (between 2016 and 2021) and has put on multiple DIY solo shows.
cassieabraham.com | @saltyjugs
Zev Aviv
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Zev Aviv/The Host is an award-winning visual and performance artist from the stolen lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. They make sculptures, lamps, props and prosthetics but mostly they make messes. Their work explores their own transgender and disabled body as well as queer joy and trans futurism. They’re also a proud anti-zionist Jew, personal trainer and former forklift driver. Their gender lives in your confusion.
Bridget Baskerville
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Bridget Baskerville is an early-career artist, based in Canberra on Ngunawal Ngambri Country. Through the themes of community, history, time and ecology, Baskerville’s work examines socio-environmental issues faced in regional Australia, looking at human impact on place and the relationship between extractive industries and water.
Her practice is informed by her experience of growing up in a mining family in Kandos, Dabee Wiradjuri Country in rural NSW. At the core of her current practice is the process of submerging metal plates in bodies of water impacted by human intervention and leaving them to corrode. This method serves as a means to emphasise the agency of water and non-human entities within these controlled systems, as evidenced by the texture and marks of corrosion that develop on the plate’s surface.
Tom Buckland
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Tom Buckland is an artist who deals in a correspondence of worlds. By examining the present and the past, they construct portals to alternate futures yet to be explored. Working with recycled materials such as cardboard and salvaged electronics, Buckland creates playful, interactive and experimental installation, video and performance work that invites the audience to embark on a journey of discovery, transporting them to other dimensions across space and time provoking introspection about their own existence and the world they inhabit.
In 2015, Buckland earned a BVA (hons) from the ANU School of Art, supported by the John and Elizabeth Baker Honours scholarship and the Canberra Contemporary Art Space graduate award. Their work has graced galleries and collections nationally and internationally, and in 2021, they were awarded the Sculpture by the Sea Clitheroe Foundation emerging artist mentorship. Buckland is currently based in Ngunawal/Canberra.
Madeline Cardone
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Madeline Cardone lives and works on Ngunnawal traditional lands in Canberra, and is a graduate from the School of Art and Design, The Australian National University. Her sculptural practice explores the thresholds between spaces, embodied memory, and material transformation, deriving from a broader interest in archaeological, anatomical and architectural theory.
Her work in glass draws on ideas of the body-as-landscape, phenomenological qualities of space, and notions of memory, preservation and decay, often referring to the material as a ‘skin’. This connection to the body is personal, of being uncomfortable in one’s skin, of taking up space, or surrendering to it. Her objects are not only formal studies, but are explorations of proximity and relationships between forms, people, the past and now. Cardone challenges the limits and lifecycles of materials, inviting slow, tactile contemplation and evoking a strange familiarity by recontextualising and abstracting space and form, further shifting an understanding and expectation of what materials can hold, reflect and become.
Cardone has exhibited nationally and internationally since 2017. She was awarded the Bassett Downs Honours Scholarship in Glass (ANU, 2021), the Vicki Torr Emerging Artist Prize (Ausglass, 2022), and the Aldo Bellini Acquisition Award for Milano Vetro Under-35 (Milan, 2024).
madelinecardone.com |@madeline.cardone
Joshua Catanzariti
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As a Canberra based artist, Joshua’s practice investigates the liminal space between the digital and the physical, focusing on how images, textures, and surfaces shift meaning as they move between screen-based environments and material form. Working across photography and installation, his approach is informed by architectural training and sustained material experimentation developed through international residencies.
Recently, Joshua has undertaken residencies in Japan at Studio Kura (Itoshima) and Space Department (Nara), and most recently was a resident artist with Dark Matter at PhotoAccess in 2025. Through collecting and re-configuring textures from built and natural environments, his work explores perception, memory, and speculative digital worlds.
joshuacatanzariti.com |@joshua_catanzariti
Lucy Chetcuti
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Lucy Chetcuti is a multidisciplinary artist based in Kamberri/Canberra, working across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and monotyping. Her practice is grounded in a deep engagement with queer-ecology, using the natural world as both subject and framework to explore queerness, identity, and belonging. Queer relationality and intimacy are at the centre of her practice.
She has presented four solo exhibitions, including All Fours at Canberra Contemporary Art Space Manuka (2023), Causal Relationships at Strathnairn Arts (2022), and Undivided Attention at The Front Gallery (2022) and Waxing, Waning at M16 Artspace (2015). Her most recent exhibition Looking Up and Looking Down at ANCA (2024), was featured in Art Guide Australia’s ‘Top 5 Exhibitions for the Week’.
Greta Cooper
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Greta Cooper is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on printmaking and photography, based in Canberra (Ngunnawal Ngambri Country). Greta’s practice explores her curiosity with nature and her connection with the environment. She is a graduate from the ANU School of Art and Design with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours).
Greta has started to explore installation by using video and audio techniques. Her artworks look at environmental themes of ecological grief, memory, storytelling, and humans’ impact on the environment. She also draws inspiration from her family and hometown Moruya.
sites.google.com/view/greta-cooper |@art.bygreta
Sophie Dumaresq
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Sophie Dumaresq is an interdisciplinary artist who brings perspectives of absurdity and humour to robotics, automata and materiality. Working across photography, video installation, sculpture and performance, her work explores what it is to try and communicate in a universe filled with beings whose brains, existence and or bodies are built inherently differently to that of your own.
Her handcrafted robotic arm from recycled ocean plastics and confirmed space debris; Stardust is currently touring Australia as part of Experiementa Emgergence, Experimenta’s 9th National Tour of Media Arts. In 2023 she also undertook a Digital Leadership Fellowship through Creative Australia and Creative New Zealand. During this fellowship, she was mentored by world renowned performance artist Stelarc. Her work is in the Macquarie Group Collection as well as several distinguished private collections. She is a studio artist with ANCA (Australian National Capital Artists).
sophiedumaresq.com | @sharkie_dee
Claire Fletcher
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Claire Fletcher (she/her) is a visual artistpracticing on Ngunnawal Country, ACT, Australia. Through painting, photography and printmedia, Fletcher explores the intersections of P.T.S.D, memory and lived experience.
Fletcher completed her Bachelor of Visual Artsat the Australian National University (ACT), majoring in Printmedia and Drawingin 2025. Recent exhibitions include Ed 6, More Than Reproduction (2025) and ANUSOAD Grad Show 2024 (2024). Her work resides in both domestic private andpublic collections.
Feature image: courtesy of the artist. Sophie Dumaresq in her ANCA studio with Baby her first mechanical shark and her dog Frankie.
