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Mark Smith x Blindside Mentorship

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Translations Perspectives (detail)
Junrong Huang Where am I (excerpt), 2024-2025. Courtesy of the artist.

Translations / Perspectives: Mark Smith x Blindside Mentorship

Arts Project Australia (APA) is proud to share Translations / Perspectives, a digital exhibition curated by APA artist Mark Smith as part of Blindside’s annual online exhibition series, MOBILE. The exhibition is the result of the 2025 APA x Blindside Artist Mentorship, a partnership that supports neurodiverse artists to expand their professional practices through mentorship and collaboration.

This year’s mentorship offered Mark Smith the opportunity to develop a curatorial project with the support from the Blindside team. Mark, whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, ceramics, video, mixed media and soft sculpture, brought his deep interest in language, translation and the human condition to his curatorial approach.

For Translations / Perspectives, Mark worked alongside Josephine Mead, the Community Coordinator at Blindside over a series of weeks to develop the curatorial concept and finesse the final selection of works. Student applications were invited from Monash University, RMIT, and the Victorian College of the Arts. The focus was on emerging artists whose practices engage with ideas of “translations” and “perspectives” through various mediums and lived experiences.

“The mentorship and curating is sort of different to what I usually do, it’s not handling my own visual art experience, it’s interpreting other peoples artwork, it was good trying to categorise them and understand them. The theme could be applied to many different interpretations and there was lots of applicants, with different perspectives and their responses blew me away. There were poets, writers, visual artists and they were all really clever.”

Mark Smith, APA artist/Curator of Translations / Perspectives

The resulting exhibition features work by Georgina Campbell, Junrong Huang, Hartley Snape, Brija Davis and Deva Kirin Hewett. Each artist offers a unique take on the curatorial themes – from interrogating the boundaries of language and ideas of home and place, to exploring the act of painting as an embodied experience and reflecting on the philosophical dimensions of making and dreaming.

Mark’s own art practice is driven by a desire to examine and express the human experience. His ceramic works question the physicality of the body through form and texture, while his soft sculptures use selected words and materials to create emotionally resonant, multi-layered statements. These same sensibilities are evident in Translations / Perspectives, where his curatorial voice emphasizes empathy, depth and connection.

“Josephine is a writer and I was interested in how she put her words together and helped me put my own words together. I look at myself as a writer because in my practice I use a lot of words. It felt like a good match to work with Josephine and I would recommend to everyone to do it [the mentorship] because there’s no hard and fast rules, you can work how you want, the whole thing was up to me, and the ball was in my court and it felt really good because I was the one making decisions.”

Mark Smith, APA artist/Curator of Translations / Perspectives

APA would like to thank to Blindside for their dedication and valued partnership in this program and congratulate Mark on the outstanding outcome of his curatorial project.

Translations / Perspectives runs from 19 May to 4 September 2025 via Blindside’s digital platform.

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.
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 Under the Lights, 2025, synthetic polymer and charcoal on raw canvas, 1.5 m x 2.2m. Courtesy of the artist.
Mark Smith in the APA studio
Mark Smith in the APA Studio
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