2026 Blindside Emerging Curator Mentorship
Emily Song, Ella Simpson, Sebastian Nutteny, Eugenie Gullifer-Laurie
4–21 Nov 2026
Each year Blindside facilitates an Emerging Curator Mentorship programme, where an emerging curator is mentored by a leading Naarm arts professional.
In 2026 artist and Emerging Curator, Ella Simpson, is mentored by Blindside Artistic Directors.
This program takes place on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We recognise that sovereignty was never ceded - this land is stolen land. We pay respects to Wurundjeri Elders, past, present and emerging, to the Elders from other communities and to any other Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders who might encounter or participate in the program.
Emily Song (she/her) is an Australian-born Chinese emerging artist who is based across Naarm (Melbourne) and Boorloo (Perth). Her multidisciplinary practice is rooted in expanded drawing, manifesting through forms of sculptural textile work, installation and the moving image. Currently engaged with intuitive material exploration and spatial investigations, her process-driven practice utilises a sense of labour and repetitive methods of making, exploring ephemerality and impermanence. Her work experiments with conscious and unconscious ways of making as a method to understand the world around her, her own lived experiences and multifaceted identities, exploring the intersections of time, memory and place. Her most recent body of work foregrounds subtlety and the understated, where absences, traces and remains work together to elicit sensory and affective encounters of the installation.
Ella Simpson is an emerging artist and arts worker whose painting practice explores the tensions between Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the abject body. Her highly personal work investigates themes of control, contamination, and the psychological relationship to the body through visceral imagery. Simpson completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at RMIT University and is currently undertaking a Master of Arts Management. She has exhibited at multiple sites, including Brunswick Street Gallery, Queen Victoria Women's Centre, RMIT, and Unassigned Gallery. Alongside her practice, she has worked as a gallery technician at Wangaratta Art Gallery and as an arts technician and teacher’s aide at Galen Catholic College.
Sebastian NuttenySebastian Nuttney is an emerging artist based in Naarm (Melbourne), who utilises lens-based media and collage-informed processes to examine the nature of being in an increasingly precarious time. Fascinated with thresholds, periods and spaces of transition, his work often explores the intricate and precarious nature of being between states. Hauntology and the failure of presence are ongoing themes in his work, exploring what occurs when we are left to contend with something removed, hidden or taken away from our sensorial boundaries. His most recent work seeks to create a space for quiet reflection on disrupted temporality, utilising still and moving image-based installations.
Eugenie Gullifer-Laurie Eugenie (they/she) is a multidisciplinary emerging artist based in Naarm/Melbourne with a focus on bodily phenomena. Their installation-based practice explores the hidden things we experience, and references psychophilosophy, mysticism, somaesthetics, and historical and contemporary discourse on afab bodies in medicine.
Ella Simpson is an emerging artist and arts worker whose painting practice explores the tensions between Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the abject body. Her highly personal work investigates themes of control, contamination, and the psychological relationship to the body through visceral imagery. Simpson completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at RMIT University and is currently undertaking a Master of Arts Management. She has exhibited at multiple sites, including Brunswick Street Gallery, Queen Victoria Women's Centre, RMIT, and Unassigned Gallery. Alongside her practice, she has worked as a gallery technician at Wangaratta Art Gallery and as an arts technician and teacher’s aide at Galen Catholic College.