10 Canberra artists to watch: Part Two
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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.
Olivia Gates
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Olivia Gates (born 1997, NSW) is an artist working and living between Ngunawal and Ngambri Country (Canberra) and her home in Kiama on Dharawal Country. Working primarily with glass, Gates’ conceptual interests are rooted in the intersection of post-Mabo white settler (un)belonging anxiety theories (Martina Horakova, 2020), and the contrasting impacts of her convict/settler lineage, both in generational connection to – and ongoing destructive colonial claims on – place.
She makes works that gently hold shared space for listening, with the intention to open respectful dialogues of shared experience and revised histories. Gates graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) / Bachelor of Design from the Australian National University in 2021. She has exhibited both locally and internationally and has acquired prizes recognising her work such as the Boronia Prize for excellence in glass, the Corning Museum of Glass / Australian National University School of Art and Design Partner Scholarship, and the Nigel Thomson Travel Grant.
Louis Grant
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Louis Grant is an early-career glass artist specialising in kiln-formed and cold-worked glass, with new work in neon. His sculptural practice centres on glass as material and metaphor. Working with neon and glass forms, he explores themes of queer identity, perception, and transformation through light and installation.
louisgrantcreative.com | @louisgrantcreative
Gabrielle Hall-Lomax
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Gabrielle Hall-Lomax is a Canberra-based visual artist working with analogue photography and darkroom printing. Her work explores memory, gender, and family history through staged imagery and slow photographic processes.
Recent exhibitions include Heirloom as part of Blaze 2025 at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, and Tactical Bodies, a collaborative project with Meg De Young shown at Hillvale Gallery in Melbourne.
gabriellehall-lomax.com | @gabriellehall_lomax
Aidan Hartshorn
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AidanHartshorn is Walgalu (Wolgalu/Wolgal) and Wiradjuri artist whose ancestral lands reside in the High Country of the Kosciusko National Park and foothills of the Snowy Mountains as well as the Riverina region of NSW.
Through his practice, Hartshorn examines the environmental and cultural impacts of commercial industrialisation within Australia’s high country. Through his cultural connections to Wolgal and Wiradjuri Country, his work is informed through passed down cultural knowledge and making processes by his father adjacent to the ongoing disruptions due to the Snowy Hydro-Electric Scheme that has submerged parts of Wolgalu Country and culturally powerful sites.
Addressing the intersections of colonisation, environmental degradation, and cultural loss, the choice of industrial materials within his work closely correlates to the aesthetics of electricity production, dam construction and infrastructure, drawing these intersections together with his cultural and artistic practice. Reflecting on the past, cultural loss, and particularly resilience, his practice focuses on addressing what remains while forming a discourse of cultural continuation within the present.
Sammy Hawker
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Through practices of reciprocity (facilitated acts of co-creation), Sammy’s works give voice to the presences of more-than human worlds. These works reflect on how knowledge and memory is inscribed within materials and the alchemical notion of essence surviving the transmutation of form. Sammy’s multi-disciplinary practice embraces photography, printmaking, text, sculpture, sound and moving image. Her works form a vast and ongoing archive, documenting sites and moments of exchange.
Emma Rani Hodges
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Emma Rani Hodges’s practice focuses on community building, migration and multiethnic identity. They do this through mixed media, textiles and storytelling. Fluctuating between image, text and object, Hodge’s work resists easy categorisation. They use ambiguous materiality to examine social boundaries and feelings of ‘otherness’.
Hodges’s work has been exhibited locally and internationally. They have been a finalist in The Churchie and The Blake Prize. Hodges is a previous recipient of The Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship and has run a community-based workshop at The Biennale of Sydney 10,000 Suns. They were also a keynote speaker at Art After Hours for Accessible Arts hosted by The Art Gallery of NSW.
Sol Karmel-Shann
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Sol Karmel-Shann is a figurative artist based in Canberra in Australia. He paints portraits in oils, working intuitively until an image and mood start to unfold. His expressive use of brush strokes, texture and colour further develops the painting’s mood. The sensitivity and depth of feeling with which he paints a person’s facial expression, body language and context is arresting and the viewer cannot help but wonder about that particular subject’s unique character and life in that moment.
solkarmelshann.com | @sol.shann
Olivia Kidston
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Olivia Kidston is an emerging artist based in Canberra. She recently graduated with Honours in Visual Arts from The ANU School of Art & Design. Grounded in an autoethnographic approach, her practice draws on lived experience with ADHD and dyslexia, shaping her work both physically and conceptually. Through textile and soft-sculptural forms, Kidston explores how embodied difference informs perception, movement, scale, and making.
Sophie Kihara-Murer
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Sophie Kihara-Murer, visual artist based on Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country (Canberra). Their work explores how expanded painting can act as a site of Black reclamation. Through the layering of found and reclaimed material, hessian, crochet, yarn, postcards and paint. They build textured surfaces that speak to cultural survival and belonging. Each painting carries traces of diasporic memory, reflecting the instability and transformation of identity.
Language weaves through the surfaces of their work by incorporating slurs, the Swahili language, and fragments of text become material forms, reclaiming words once used to wound and transforming them into marks of resilience. Their practice operates within expanded painting, abstraction and repair, drawing from both African textile histories and Western art traditions
They recently graduated with Honours from the ANU School of Art and Design, where their research focused on expanded painting as a site of material experimentation, cultural memory, and historical negotiation.
Isaac Kozlovskis
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Isaac Kozlovskis is a settler and artist working on stolen Ngunnawal and Ngambri land. He uses video, text, performance and objects as tools to understand the everyday and the strange in contemporary life. His work navigates themes of vulnerability, humour, and ego.
In 2025 Isaac was included as a finalist in the National Still Life Award at YAM Coffs, and the Gosford Moving Image Art Award for his work The Challenge (2025).
He also makes bricks.
Feature image: Olivia Kidston via @livycreates_
