These six shortlisted emerging visual artists will receive invaluable support, curatorial advocacy and exposure to the industry and wider NSW arts audiences.
The long-standing fellowship has been a successful platform for nurturing the immense talent within NSW’s visual arts community for more than 120 years. In partnership with Create NSW and Artspace, the annual NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) opportunity supports emerging visual arts practitioners to challenge and expand their practice under the mentorship of Artspace’s curatorial team.
This important curatorial support will see the six shortlisted applicants realise works for the 2025 NSW Visual Art Fellowship (Emerging) Exhibition at Artspace in August 2025.
At the exhibition official launch, one shortlisted artist will be named as recipient of the prestigious $30,000 fellowship, enabling the emerging artist to undertake a self-directed program of professional development and significant career advancement.
Previous recipients of the Fellowship include Gillian Kayrooz (2024), Morgan Hogg (2023), Eddie Abd (2022), Dennis Golding (2020), Shivanjani Lal (2019), Claudia Nicholson (2017), Consuelo Cavaniglia (2016), Heath Franco (2015), Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran (2014), Jamie North (2013), Soda Jerk (2011), Khaled Sabsabi (2010), Diego Bonetto (2008) and Tony Schwenson (1988).
Create NSW Director of Arts, Karen Rodgers said:
“The calibre of shortlisted artists for the 2025 NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) is second to none, representing the diversity and dynamism of artistic practice across NSW. Being selected for this important program is a significant achievement and milestone in the professional development of all our finalists.
“Artspace’s annual commitment to collaboration and mentorship of each shortlisted recipient delivers an unforgettable visual art exhibition which is a must-see highlight in the NSW contemporary arts calendar.”
Michelle Newton, Interim Executive Director, Artspace said:
“The NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) program, presented at Artspace, brings together early career artists in conversation with an early career curator, mentored by the Artspace senior curatorial. This is really an opportunity for them to build new networks, develop skills and present their work in a generative, inspiring and professional environment.
“Congratulations to all six shortlisted finalists Ellen Ferrier, Ellie Hannon, Ali Noble, Vedika Rampal, Joel Sherwood Spring and Ali Tahayori, and I look forward to seeing what they develop for the Fellowship exhibition.”
Biographies of Shortlisted Artists
Ellen Ferrier
Ellen Ferrier is a multidisciplinary installation artist based in the Byron Bay hinterlands of Northern NSW. Her practice is focused on the exploration and creation of regenerative materials, drawing on a diverse range of processes from pre-industrial to contemporary scientific. Engaging with localised waste streams, Ferrier’s diverse mediums include invasive weeds, sheep intestines, raw wool, reclaimed copper, fallen timber and foraged seaweed, among others. Through her experimentation with these materials, Ferrier creates large-scale multisensory installations that entice transformative shifts in how we perceive, understand, and relate to the world around us.
Ellie Hannon
Ellie is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Newcastle NSW who works across exhibitions, public art and community-engaged projects. These process-led actions fuel her visual account presenting personal and political issues in relation to place. Informed through her involvement with community art projects, and environmental and social justice communities, Ellie makes art as a means to connect with a sense of place that prioritises relationship building and reparation, both internal and external, self and environment, the simple and complex.
Ali Noble
Ali’s practise is underpinned by a resistance to the pressures of standardisation and homogeneity, specifically neuro-normativity and gender expectations. To counteract feelings of invisibility and stagnancy, she deploys a material sensibility of 'enchantment' and 'soft-contrariness’. By creating opportunities for movement, touch and sensuality, through textiles, video, mobile sculptures and intent, her work embodies a captivating invitation to mutuality and reciprocity.
Vedika Rampal
Vedika is an Indian-born artist who primarily lives and practices on Darug and GuriNgai. Her post-disciplinary practice intuitively oscillates between image and image forms, using the language of sculpture, textiles, photography and text to interrogate Western museological modalities enshrined in the colonial optics of centre/periphery spatial relations and linear temporalities.
Joel Sherwood Spring
Joel is a Wiradjuri anti-disciplinary artist based in Sydney/Gadigal/Wangal lands. He works collaboratively on projects that examine ways of seeing Country through technology and desires for Indigeneity. Joel’s work confronts and channels both the desire for land and minerals at the core of our national identity and what today appear as 'progressive' identity formations. He explores the potential of Indigenous materialist readings of art and architecture towards repatriation, reparation, and return of land. He is learning how to employ art making, exhibition making, publishing, and pedagogy within what is recognised as black or Indigenous studies.
Ali Tahayori
Ali’s interdisciplinary practice ranges from photography to the moving image and installation. His practice combines a discourse about diaspora and displacement with an exploration of queerness – in both cases poignantly testifying to his experience of being othered. Combining fractured mirrors with text and imagery, his works draw on ancient Iranian philosophies about light and mirrors to create kaleidoscopic experiences; moments of both revelation and concealment hint at the conflicted nature of his identity.
Image: Top row L-R: Ellen Ferrier, Image Kristen Augeard; Ellie Hannon, Image Bonnie-Grace Dwyer; Ali Noble, Image Richard Healey-Finlay;
Bottom row L-R: Vedika Rampal, image Liam Macann; Joel Sherwood Spring, SAVAGE SYSTEMSTM, (still), 2024. Courtesy the artist; Ali Tahayori, image: Jacquie Manning
