Translations / Perspectives

Curated by Mark Smith of Arts Project Australia

The 2025 Arts Project Australia X Blindside Artist Mentorship has provided Blindside-led mentorship for APA artist Mark Smith to curate an exhibition for Blindside’s annual online exhibition series MOBILE. For ‘Translations / Perspectives’ Mark Smith invited applications from three leading art schools: Monash University, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Victorian College of the Arts. With an interest in providing professional development opportunities directly for emerging artists, Mark asked the students to think through notions of “translations” and “perspectives” through different mediums and from different lived experiences.

Junrong Huang, Where am I (excerpt), 2024-2025, bilingual (Chinese - English) visual-poetry book, 29.7 x 42cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Mark Smith is inspired by language. Thinking through how language can give us the ability to translate and perceive, Mark has brought together a group of emerging artists who are interrogating the boundaries of language through ideas of home and place; the embodied act of painting; notions of translation through acts of making and philisophical thinking; and the power of dreams.

Working through photography and text, Junrong Huang has created a visual poem in the form of an artist book. The images, captured in black and white film using traditional gelatin darkroom techniques, explore fleeting moments of the everyday. Huang, who was born in China, took these photographs while living in Naarm/Melbourne. Through capturing daily commutes and weekends spent at the Botanical Gardens, Huang has illuminated moments of connection to space, considering the effects of sensorial connection.

Junrong Huang, Where am I (excerpt), 2024-2025, bilingual (Chinese - English) visual-poetry book, 29.7 x 42cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Fragments of poetic text, interspersed throughout the book, are bilingual – occupying both Chinese and English. Huang speaks of voices that linger, shadows that whisper, and moments of aesthetic experience. She considers edges, echoes, folds, and ripples to question the ephemerality of daily life. Shifting between languages, between places and between internal and external landscapes, Huang invites the viewer to consider where they are in this current moment—through language, embodied experience, and space.

Junrong Huang, Where am I (excerpt), 2024-2025, bilingual (Chinese - English) visual-poetry book, 29.7 x 42cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Junrong Huang, Where am I (excerpt), 2024-2025, bilingual (Chinese - English) visual-poetry book, 29.7 x 42cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Georgina Campbell, Under the Lights, 2025, synthetic polymer and charcoal on raw canvas, 1.5 m x 2.2m. Courtesy of the artist.

Georgina Campbell examines language through the act of painting. For ‘Under the Lights’, expressive thick white brushstrokes have been brandished over a grey canvas ground. Fascinated by the mind and its malleable nature of rewiring neural pathways, Campbell is interested in how the primal processes of thinking can be translated into the act of painting. She is interrogating how mark-making can become language.

Brija Davis, Red, 2025, digital moving image. Courtesy of the artist.

Brija Davis works to translate the medium of painting into the digital sphere through 'Red'—a digital collage comprising of text and documentation of drawings and paintings created by the artist. As Davis notes, “as I created consciously and unconsciously, the elements seemed to converse, building upon their own world, offering answers while gifting us with gaps. There is a play of narratives hinted at in the poem. My intention was to spark more curiosity than conclusion.”

Deva Kirin Hewett, amor fati in Light I, 2025, collage. Courtesy of the artist.

Deva Kirin Hewett, amor fati in Light III, 2025, collage. Courtesy of the artist.

Deva Kirin Hewett has drawn inspiration from the Latin phrase, “Amor Fati” which means “love of fate.” The term was used by Friedrich Nietzsche to reconsider experiences deemed as hardships, such as loss and suffering, as moments to be appreciated. It is a term that urges one to focus on the now, embracing the challenges of life. Through contemplation of this term via text in both English and in French, Hewett then layered the hand-written prose, and by visually translating the self through AI, produced self-portraits. Hewett is expressing Nietzsche’s conceptual fashioning of the term through her own experience, noting, “this work is a translation of the way I’ve endeavoured to live my life.”

Deva Kirin Hewett, amor fati in Light II, 2025, collage. Courtesy of the artist.

Hartley Snape invites us into the dream world through a series of microcassette recordings. The process of recording of dreams has been Snape’s longest occupation so far. Produced across two years, the artist has detailed their dreams through Dictaphone recordings—documented just before sleep and upon waking. The dreams interweave with events from Snape’s daily life—moving between moments of lucid memory and experiences that sit outside of reality. Snape has built a self-archive, currently consisting of 19 microcassettes and transcripts—as documented in the accompanying photograph. This archive provides Snape an opportunity to memorialise these dream findings and debriefings. The work considers how one’s understandings of self can change, be immortalised and be maintained, when translated through the mediums of dream, spoken word and written text.

Hartley Snape, Dictaphones, transcriber, tapes, transcription and notes on table, 2025, digital photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

Hartley Snape, Excerpt #1, 2023, microcassette recording, 02.08. Courtesy of the artist.

Hartley Snape, Excerpt #2, 2023, microcassette recording, 02.08. Courtesy of the artist.

Hartley Snape, Excerpt #3, 2023, microcassette recording, 02.08. Courtesy of the artist.

‘Translations / Perspectives’ is an expansive document of the power of translative practice.