New Contemporaries 2022

The Sydney College of the Arts will hold its annual New Contemporaries exhibition, showcasing the work of the 2022 graduating cohort. 

A culmination of the graduating artists’ collective research and practice-based outcomes, the exhibition will display works from a range of studio areas including Screen Arts, Photography, Painting, Print media, Sculpture, Ceramics, Glass, Jewellery and Object. 

For the second year in a row, New Contemporaries will also launch an online exhibition in parallel with the physical exhibition – which will run from Thursday, 1 December to Saturday, 10 December in the University’s Old Teachers’ College.

Dr David Haines, Senior Lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, said the exhibition showcased the breadth and skill of the graduating artists. 

“In this year’s New Contemporaries, the old notions of distinct disciplines explode into a kaleidoscope of work reflecting future art,” he said. 

“This is an info-savvy generation of artists that have chosen aesthetics to push back against an overheated world of mass communication – they often surprise with their embrace of ideas and technology and throw that against the more familiar forms of art, producing surprising work that we think will have a lot to give to the wider culture in the future.”

Shana O’Brien is a First Nations artist who grew up on Darkinjung Country, North of the Hawkesbury River. An interest in mix-media works led her to commence a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts. Her work is inspired by the land, the ways that we connect to the land and to each other. She likes to consider the ways that the viewers eyes will be taken on a journey when looking at the shapes, colours and patterns in her works, and sees this movement as a kind of dance she can evoke in others.

Anna May Kirk is an artist, curator and creative producer based in Sydney, Australia, graduating this year from the Honours of Fine Arts program. 

As an artist, Kirk is interested in the representational issue posed by the immaterial and spectral nature of Anthropogenic climate change. Through sculptural glass and sensory installations, Kirk engages the beholder’s body as a sensitive and porous instrument for encountering the magnitude of environmental change. In her research-based practice, Kirk entangles references to vast times, intensities and scales of our transforming planetary condition, often investigating past moments of climatic change throughout Earth’s history in order to speculate on the uncertain future. 

Morgan Hogg is an emerging artist living and working on unceded Dhurag land. She is of Cook Island and English heritage. Through the perspective of her Indigenous Moana heritage, Hogg utilises installation and performance as visual representations of her own exploration of cultural identity while living in the diaspora.

Also graduating this year from the Honours of Fine Arts program, Hogg’s material practice looks at the ancestral passings of storytelling traditions and shrine-like imagery within her installations. The disconnect that colonisation has brought to the Pasifika diaspora plays within her archival research and performative storytelling dances.

Bronte Cormican-Jones is an emerging contemporary visual artist and writer living and working on the traditional lands of the Garigal and Durramuragal people, Sydney. She completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (majoring in Sculpture and English) in 2021 and is graduating this year from Honours in Visual Arts at SCA.

In her visual arts practice, Cormican-Jones often explores the field of spatial practice through her sculptural works, installation, performance and documented works. She is drawn to glass and the industrial materials of steel, bricks and timber, and is interested in the way these materials are used in architecture and the infrastructure of the world around us. 

Exhibition Dates: Friday 2 December – Saturday 10 December 2022
Exhibition Viewing Hours:
Monday – Friday: 11am-5pm
Saturday: 12pm-4pm

Location: SCA Gallery and adjoining spaces, Old Teachers’ College, Manning Road, The University of Sydney, Camperdown.

View the New Contemporaries 2022 online exhibition here. 

Hero image: Bronte Cormican-Jones' sculptural glass work at the New Contemporaries 2022 exhibition