Upcoming Exhibitions
Opening 6pm Friday 28 August 2026
Belconnen Arts Centre, Canberra ACT
Free entry, no booking required
Stone and Shadow explores the dialogue between stone, light, and perception. Rooted in the natural world, Senden Blackwood’s sculptural practice distills organic rhythms into abstract lines, textures, and forms. Working primarily with hard, unfigured stone, he investigates how light travels across curves and edges — how illumination transforms weight into movement and solidity into quiet radiance.
As the day unfolds, shifting light reveals new dimensions within each work, inviting viewers to experience stone as a living, responsive material. This interplay of surface and shadow becomes a language in itself — subtle, temporal, and contemplative.
The exhibition presents a collection of large freestanding works alongside smaller tabletop and wall-mounted pieces, arranged to harness the gallery’s natural light. Together, they form an immersive environment that invites slow looking and sensory engagement.
A short film accompanying the exhibition traces the five-year creation of Blackwood’s monumental work, completed in 2022, offering a deeper insight into the physical and philosophical dimensions of his practice. Stone and Shadow reveals not only the endurance and craft of stone carving but also its potential for stillness, transformation, and grace.
5 November - 12 December 2026
Craft + Design Canberra Festival
Small Rituals: handmade, handheld
In an age of acceleration, mass production and the disposable object, Senden Blackwood's granite vessels are an act of quiet defiance. Each piece is carved by hand from one of the hardest materials on earth, a process so slow and deliberate it refuses the very logic of our contemporary world. Where industry demands speed, uniformity and obsolescence, these works insist on patience, permanence and the irreplaceable intelligence of the hand.
The forms themselves, nesting hemispheres, split spheres, stacked cones and vessels of geometric clarity, carry the reductive rigour and geometric delight of Bauhaus design. Yet Blackwood turns that modernist vocabulary against its own industrial ambitions. The Bauhaus dreamed of forms fit for the machine; here those same pure geometries are wrested from stone one grinding pass at a time, each surface bearing the evidence of sometimes months of labour. It is functionalism made deliberately, gloriously slow and exacting.
To drink from a granite cup, to lift a stone bowl worn smooth by patient labour is to be returned to weight, to time, to the geological, to the aesthetic pleasure of touch. In their exceptional craftsmanship these objects dissent from the culture of the instant, arguing without a word that slow making has the highest possible worth and refusing, quietly, the logic of mass consumption that is destroying our planet.
Contemporary Australian sculptor Senden Blackwood creates elemental works in stone, where intuition, endurance, and natural forms converge to reveal quiet, refined beauty. His organic forms explore the play of light and shadow on solid material, offering dynamic fine art for both indoor and outdoor spaces.
