2026 ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE

Ira Gold + Nina Casey-Brown

Ira Gold and Nina Casey Brown are the recipients of the 2026 Canberra Contemporary ANU School of Art & Design Emerging Artist Support Scheme Mentorship and Exhibition Award. Ira and Nina will receive mentorship and support from Canberra Contemporary during 2026, culminating in solo exhibitions at Platform at the beginning of 2027.

Ira Gold is a practicing artist of Torres Strait Islander, Japanese, Indonesian and European descent. Born in Garamilla (Darwin) on Larrakia Country and grew up in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) on Arrernte country. Ira has completed his studies of Bachelor of Visual Arts Honours at the Australian National University in 2025. His practice marks a focus to explore themes of identity and belonging for someone raised on someone else’s Country. In his Honour’s work The Blue Highway 2025 Ira explores his connection to cultural heritage through practice-led research methods. Creating a multi-media installation to represent identity through establishing connections through art.

Nina Casey-Brown is an emerging artist whose practice examines how glass shapes the way we see and are seen. Working with hand-silvered, blown, and repurposed glass mirrors, her work explores shifting relationships between body, space, and surface. These mirrors do not return a perfect image; instead, they reveal their own making. Folds, seams, and distortions speak to the instability of perception.

Embracing the material’s unpredictability, Casey-Brown allows the forces of heat, gravity, expansion, and rotation to shape each form. Through both physical and digital translation, she creates objects that fragment reflection, blur boundaries between inside and outside, and invite viewers to dwell in uncertainty rather than clarity.