2026 Blindside Emerging Curator Mentorship: Fragmented Tensions
Emily Song, Ella Simpson, Sebastian Nuttney, 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.
Artist and recent RMIT Arts Management graduate Ella Simpson has been chosen as this year's emerging curator, mentored by Blindside Artistic Directors Yongping Ren, Ben Woods, and Skye Malu Baker.
Fragmented Tensions is an exhibition generated from two years of visual and emotional inquiry within the collection of human tissue specimens at the Harry Brookes Allen Museum of Anatomy and Pathology. This project began as a way for curator Ella Simpson to confront and explore her contamination-based OCD and fear of disease through sustained visual engagement with the pathological specimens. Simpson invited artists Sebastian Nuttney, Emily Song, and Gigi Gullifer-Laurie to experience the collection and materialise their own personal encounter with the museum’s archive and space. The invited artists contributed a generative dialogue with observations of pathology, unpacking the tensions involved, both physical and psychological. Through these encounters, the artists considered the familiar humanity of the anonymous specimens, and the instability that emerges when a once-living body is transformed into an object for observation.
With special thanks to the Harry Brookes Allen Museum of Anatomy and Pathology, and Rohan Long.
Each year Blindside facilitates an Emerging Curator Mentorship program, where an emerging curator is mentored by a leading Naarm arts professional. This year, artist and curator Ella Simpson has been mentored by Blindside Artistic Directors to produce the exhibition Fragmented Tensions.
Fragmented Tensions is an exhibition of works made in response to observing and ruminating on dissected and preserved bodies from artists Sebastian Nuttney, Emily Song, Gigi Gullifer-Laurie, and Ella Simpson.
With special thanks to the Harry Brookes Allen Museum of Anatomy and Pathology, and Rohan Long.
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.
Ella Simpson (she/her) is an emerging artist and arts worker whose painting practice explores the tensions between Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Catholicism 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) and a Master of Arts Management at RMIT University.
Sebastian 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 Gullifer-Laurie (Gigi) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Naarm/Melbourne with a focus on bodily phenomena. Their practice explores hidden corporeal experiences, revealing what is usually concealed by flesh or by censorship and erasure: the internal workings of the body, the abject and private aspects of being human, and the reality of living with invisible and underrepresented conditions. She is currently an MFA candidate at RMIT.
Ella Simpson (she/her) is an emerging artist and arts worker whose painting practice explores the tensions between Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Catholicism 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) and a Master of Arts Management at RMIT University.