Email us:
[email protected]
Follow us:

Sculpture

About

The National Art School’s outstanding Sculpture faculty instructs students in the Bachelor of Fine Art (BFA) and Master of Fine Art (MFA) programs to develop key technical skills across traditions such as modelling, carving, construction, pattern making, mould making and casting, as well as exploring the boundaries of contemporary visual art through installation art, textiles and site responsive practises.

Sculpture students at NAS have access to some of the best-equipped workshops and studios in Australia and are taught by highly experienced lecturers. This allows students to master practical skills such as welding and construction, working across different materials such as steel, timber, plaster, clay, resin, cardboard and fabric. Students also gain the in-depth conceptual understanding needed to pursue a successful career in visual art.

The faculty team is led by Head of Sculpture Hany Armanious, also a successful and respected practicing artist who has represented Australia at the Venice Biennale and whose work is held in collections around the country and overseas. All Sculpture lecturers are also accomplished professional artists, dedicated to engaging, supporting and challenging their students during their time at art school.

NAS is renowned for its studio-based, hands-on model of learning. All Sculpture students receive intensive face-to-face teaching in small classes and are allocated their own studio in the final year of their BFA. Postgraduate students also have their own studio on campus. As well as thriving under the tuition of experts, Sculpture students are encouraged to support each other and work together as a creative community to develop their studio practice, share research and experiment with form, material and space.

In the BFA program, all students take Sculpture in their first year as part of their studio rotations which also includes painting, photomedia, printmaking and ceramics. In second year, students focus fully on a chosen studio area such as Sculpture, however there are always opportunities for cross-disciplinary work.

Facilities

NAS Sculpture facilities include:

  • Dedicated plaster room for mould making and casting
  • Metal workshop with welding bays and metal fabrication equipment
  • Separate woodwork space
  • Access to 3D printer
  • Sewing machines
  • Digital image technology

NAS has a number of public spaces and opportunities for students to exhibit their works and be involved in professional work experience over the course of their degrees.

CONTACT

Please fill in our online enquiry form below or call us on +61 2 9339 8651 to speak to our Student Services Team.

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Alumni

Sculpture graduates from NAS have gone on to successful careers in the art sector, exhibiting in commercial galleries and not-for-profit art spaces, participating in numerous outdoor sculpture events around Australia and overseas, and securing public commissions. Graduates also have opportunities in film and television prop departments as well as stage and theatre.

Rmsina Daniel

Jenny Herbert-Smith

Em Ingram-Shute

Alexandra Mills

Nigel Milson

Tania McMurtry

Johann Tovar Carrera

Core Subject

This outline for Sculpture Studio Elective 1, a core first year subject at NAS, gives an insight into the foundations of the sculpture program.

Sculpture Studio Elective I

This BFA First Year subject aims to further the creative, intellectual and speculative capacity of each student informed by practical studio experience, and to broadly familiarise students with the body of knowledge that constitutes the sculpture discipline.

Subject Content
The class follows a sequence of projects and problem-solving exercises, exploring the means of expression through the conventions of modeling and construction, developing an understanding of the language of sculpture and of the basic methodologies of the practice of sculpture including:

  • Describing and comparing the historical and contemporary perspectives that underscore the practice of sculpture
  • Discussion of work produced within the class
  • Developing the ability to research and understand the historical origins of projects
  • Documenting and presenting the source materials and influences of their work
  • Presenting work appropriately
  • Selecting and safely using appropriate materials and equipment, and engaging with professional standards of studio practice including Workplace Health and Safety (WHS) guidelines relevant to the Sculpture studio

Learning Outcomes
Students who successfully complete this subject will be able to:

  • Develop art works through the use of traditional processes in sculpture
  • Demonstrate technical competence in two of these traditional processes: modelling and construction
  • Describe the history and conventions of sculpture, particularly relating to modelling and construction
  • Engage in critical analysis of their art work and that of their peers
  • Work co-operatively, undertaking all tasks in accordance with Workplace Health and Safety (WHS) standards relevant to the Sculpture studio

Short Courses

In addition to full degree study, NAS offers an extensive range of Short Courses suited to all ages and experience levels. The courses are taught by practicing artists and are run on campus and online throughout the year, covering every artistic discipline from ceramics to sculpture to photomedia. NAS also offers an extensive school holiday program for all primary and high school students. Visit the Short Course pages for more information about what’s coming up.

STAFF

  • Hany Armanious

    Head of Sculpture

  • Jacqueline Bradley

    Sculpture Lecturer

  • David Horton

    Sculpture Lecturer

  • Dr Liz Bradshaw

    Sculpture Lecturer (Sessional)

  • Gary Deirmendjian

    Sculpture Lecturer (Sessional), Ceramics Lecturer (Sessional), Drawing Lecturer (Sessional)

  • Bridie Lunney

    Sculpture Lecturer (Sessional)

  • Em Ingram-Shute

    Printmaking Lecturer (Sessional), Sculpture Lecturer (Sessional)

Hany Armanious

Head of Sculpture

BVA (CAI), PhD (UOW)

Hany Armanious, one of Australia’s foremost artists, will take up the position of Head of Sculpture at the National Art School from the beginning of the 2019 academic year. A warm, experienced and inspirational educator, Hany Armanious has been teaching in the higher education context since 1998, as a lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, the College of Fine Art, UNSW and most recently as a full time permanent lecturer at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. At QCA he has been responsible for the design and implementation of a new sculpture curriculum, expanding the understanding
of the role of sculpture in contemporary art, with an emphasis on merging skills and material possibilities with conceptual rigour.

Jacqueline Bradley

Sculpture Lecturer

Jacqueline Bradley is an artist concerned with bodily relationships to the outdoors. Through objects, performances and installations, she explores the role textiles and clothing play in constructing and mediating experiences of the landscape.

Bradley has exhibited and collaborated with artists and curators in Australia and internationally, and worked with national parks staff and landscape architects on projects regarding performance in the landscape in Canada and Australia. In recent years, she has developed projects for the National Portrait Gallery, the Drill Hall Gallery and the South Australian touring exhibition ‘I’m a feminist, but…’.

In early 2019 Jacqueline was funded by Arts ACT and the Australian Embassy in Washington to exhibit works from her PhD series ‘Am I doing this right?’ and to develop and construct a large artwork on at the Embassy Gallery in Washington. Her work was recently discussed in Columbia Universities Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, and she is currently working on a new project for the Unsolicited Proposals Unit, curated by Eleanor Scicchitano.

As well as lecturing at the National Art School, Jacqueline works from her backyard studio in Canberra.

David Horton

Sculpture Lecturer

BFA, MFA (NAS)

David Horton is an award winning sculptor who uses welded steel to explore space and light through mellifluous line and geometric form. He has won major awards in the Sculpture by the Sea, Helen Lempriere, Waverley Woollahra, Transfield and Sydney Airport Sculpture awards. He is a lecturer in sculpture and drawing at the National Art School and Sydney Grammar School. His sculptures are currently being exhibited at the McClelland Sculpture Survey exhibition in Melbourne.

Dr Liz Bradshaw

Sculpture Lecturer (Sessional)

Liz Bradshaw is an artist and cultural researcher. Her work is engaged with the historical and epistemological archives of industrialisation and modernity and reworks the ideas, processes and artifacts of these histories as they resurface in contemporary culture transformed by technology and globalisation. She investigates the ways these histories and praxes produce marginalisation, and resist, silence or accomodate the voices of others. She has exhibited and published internationally, and her work is held in public and private collections in Sydney, New York and the UK. She has taught art and design at Universities & Colleges in Australia and England.

Gary Deirmendjian

Sculpture Lecturer (Sessional), Ceramics Lecturer (Sessional), Drawing Lecturer (Sessional)

Gary Deirmendjian is an established Sydney based contemporary artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, photography, video, installation and site-specific intervention. Working predominantly in public/shared space, he is broadly recognised as a sharp observer of the present and for creating thought provoking and socially concerned works of challenging scale and immersive qualities. He has exhibited extensively and received numerous new work invitations and commissions for private and public artworks, as well as site-specific projects, realised broadly in Australia and several internationally. 

Recent points of note include the publication of his multi-voiced monograph A PREVAILING SENSE OF DISQUIET (Hardie Grant Books 2020); award of the NAS British School at Rome, Residency (2017); presence (2017), a major site-specific moving image commission for Wynyard Railway Station, Sydney; and pulse (2020), a major site-specific moving image commission for Federation Square, Melbourne.

He holds an MFA in Sculpture from the National Art School (2006), where he currently teaches (Sessional Lecturer since 2012 serving extensively in the BA Sculpture program and broadly across other disciplines as Post Graduate supervisor).

Prior to turning to full-time artistic practice, he trained as an Aeronautical Engineer (Honours, University of NSW, 1990) becoming significantly active in Defence R & D and then Industrial Design through establishing private practice and teaching (full time Lecturer, Western Sydney University, 1996–2001). He is the author/photographer of Sydney Sandstone (Craftsman House, 2002), which include contributing essays from Tim Flannery and Philip Cox amongst others.

Bridie Lunney

Sculpture Lecturer (Sessional)

Bridie Lunney has taught for a decade in Melbourne at Monash Art Design Architecture, Victorian College of the Arts and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology across Sculpture, Contemporary Practice, Drawing and Interior Design. In addition to currently lecturing in Sculpture at the National Art School, Bridie is also a PhD candidate at Monash Art Design Architecture.

 

Bridie focuses on combining practices of large-scale architectural interventions, sculpture and durational performance. Bridie’s recent projects include Temporal Proximities, Magdalene Laundries at Abbotsford Convent, 2019; From Will to Form, TarraWarra Biennial, New Histories at Bendigo Art Gallery, 2018; and Fold for Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture, Federation Square, 2017.

Em Ingram-Shute

Printmaking Lecturer (Sessional), Sculpture Lecturer (Sessional)

Em Ingram-Shute’s practice concerns the affective in-between space across artist, object and viewer. She is interested in the communicative potential of found objects as a generative medium
that sets forth a series of events. Working with both discarded and commercial objects, her practices employs detailed material processes of deconstruction and recomposition. With this, she endeavours to break down binaries in language and power structures that are embedded within objects.
Ingram-Shute completed her Masters and Bachelors of Fine Art with a major in sculpture at the National Art School and was the recipient of multiple awards. She is represented by the Dominik Mersch Gallery where she has held two solo shows. Her works are held in private collections around Australia and in 2023 she received grants from Create NSW and corporate sponsors to exhibit at Sculptures by the Sea in Bondi. In 2024, she was awarded The National Art School Onslow Storrier Residency at the La Cite International Des Arts in Paris. Ingram-Shute practices in a not-for-profit artist collective that she co-founded in Inner West Sydney.
#Follow us on Instagram

Art Club is our high school student program for 15-17 year olds, designed to enhance and extend students’ technical, conceptual, and intellectual skills, through intensive practical study in the disciplines offered at NAS as well as engaging in an experience of our studios and campus, under the expert direction of experienced artists.

Set your child on a creative path with Art Club.

Learn more at the link in bio.

View

Apr 15

Open
Art Club is our high school student program for 15-17 year olds, designed to enhance and extend students’ technical, conceptual, and intellectual skills, through intensive practical study in the disciplines offered at NAS as well as engaging in an experience of our studios and campus, under the expert direction of experienced artists. Set your child on a creative path with Art Club. Learn more at the link in bio.

Thank you to everyone who attended the opening night of the 24th Dobell Drawing Prize and congratulations again to the prize winner NAS alumna Rosemary Lee.

The 24th Dobell Drawing Prize is now open until Saturday 21 June 2025
11am – 5pm Monday to Saturday
NAS Gallery
Free admission, all welcome

Learn more about the exhibition at the link in bio.

View

Apr 11

Open
Thank you to everyone who attended the opening night of the 24th Dobell Drawing Prize and congratulations again to the prize winner NAS alumna Rosemary Lee. The 24th Dobell Drawing Prize is now open until Saturday 21 June 2025 11am – 5pm Monday to Saturday NAS Gallery Free admission, all welcome Learn more about the exhibition at the link in bio.

We are delighted to announce NAS alumna Rosemary Lee as the winner of the 24th Dobell Drawing Prize, Australia’s leading prize for drawing, worth $30,000.

Selected from 56 nationwide finalists, and 965 entries, Rosemary’s work will become part of the National Art School’s significant collection, built over the past 120 years. Rosemary, in her winning work 24-1 (2024), observes tonal and compositional profundity in everyday life.

The judging panel comprising acclaimed First Nations artist Vernon Ah Kee, Paula Latos-Valier AM, Trustee and Art Director of the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation, and Dr Yolunda Hickman, Head of Postgraduate Studies, National Art School, commented of Rosemary’s work: “The decision to award the 24th Dobell Drawing Prize to Rosemary Lee for the work ‘24-1’ was unanimous. We were most impressed by the level of visual intensity the artist has achieved in this work both through its vibrant colour and in the extraordinary detail of the composition. The artwork’s exploration of the urban landscape and gentrification of the Sydney suburbs of Ashfield and Summer Hill, has produced an image capturing a broader sense of transience and the omnipresence of construction sites in our cities today. It questions the cultural and historical value of place, through the lens of the artist’s personal connection.”

See Lee’s work alongside the work of the other finalists in the 24th Dobell Drawing Prize, 11 April – 21 June 2025, NAS Gallery
—
Left to right: NAS Director and CEO, Dr Kristen Sharp with artist Rosemary Lee, featuring winning artwork 24–1, 2024, pencil on paper, image courtesy the artist and National Art School Gallery © the artist, photograph: Peter Morgan

View

Apr 10

Open
We are delighted to announce NAS alumna Rosemary Lee as the winner of the 24th Dobell Drawing Prize, Australia’s leading prize for drawing, worth $30,000. Selected from 56 nationwide finalists, and 965 entries, Rosemary’s work will become part of the National Art School’s significant collection, built over the past 120 years. Rosemary, in her winning work 24-1 (2024), observes tonal and compositional profundity in everyday life. The judging panel comprising acclaimed First Nations artist Vernon Ah Kee, Paula Latos-Valier AM, Trustee and Art Director of the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation, and Dr Yolunda Hickman, Head of Postgraduate Studies, National Art School, commented of Rosemary’s work: “The decision to award the 24th Dobell Drawing Prize to Rosemary Lee for the work ‘24-1’ was unanimous. We were most impressed by the level of visual intensity the artist has achieved in this work both through its vibrant colour and in the extraordinary detail of the composition. The artwork’s exploration of the urban landscape and gentrification of the Sydney suburbs of Ashfield and Summer Hill, has produced an image capturing a broader sense of transience and the omnipresence of construction sites in our cities today. It questions the cultural and historical value of place, through the lens of the artist’s personal connection.” See Lee’s work alongside the work of the other finalists in the 24th Dobell Drawing Prize, 11 April – 21 June 2025, NAS Gallery — Left to right: NAS Director and CEO, Dr Kristen Sharp with artist Rosemary Lee, featuring winning artwork 24–1, 2024, pencil on paper, image courtesy the artist and National Art School Gallery © the artist, photograph: Peter Morgan

Introducing the National Art School Short Courses Program from July–December 2025

Whether you’re a beginner, rediscovering a past passion, refining your skills, or considering our Fine Arts degree, the short courses offer a stimulating and rewarding experience for all levels.

Our 2025 program begins in July with Winter School, followed by Term Three, Spring Weekend Workshops in September, and Term Four in October.

Learn more and enrol at the link in bio.

View

Apr 10

Open
Introducing the National Art School Short Courses Program from July–December 2025 Whether you’re a beginner, rediscovering a past passion, refining your skills, or considering our Fine Arts degree, the short courses offer a stimulating and rewarding experience for all levels. Our 2025 program begins in July with Winter School, followed by Term Three, Spring Weekend Workshops in September, and Term Four in October. Learn more and enrol at the link in bio.

Making Sound is a performance event featuring four artists who make devices that make sound, including Gary Warner, Pia van Gelder, Ben Denham and Sean O’Connell, presented following Facture: Drawing Symposium 2025, Saturday 12 April 5-6pm.

Gary Warner creates an improvised soundfield with his ‘aleatoric ensemble’ autonomous sound machines, a collection of modified turntables that spin ad-hoc bric-a-brac assemblages.

Pia van Gelder (pictured) amplifies an electronic circuit as it is built in real-time. Under the moniker of “PvG sans PCB,” in these performances, van Gelder works on a breadboard with electronic components and additional found objects to demonstrate the electronic variabilities produced in the material world.

Ben Denham and Sean O’Connell perform together with handmade synthesizer systems that sense and sonify barometric pressure and the flow of electrons through matter.

Purchase your tickets to the symposium at the link in bio.
—
Pia van Gelder, `sans PCB`, 2021, performance, Collings Creative, image courtesy and © the artist

View

Apr 6

Open
Making Sound is a performance event featuring four artists who make devices that make sound, including Gary Warner, Pia van Gelder, Ben Denham and Sean O’Connell, presented following Facture: Drawing Symposium 2025, Saturday 12 April 5-6pm. Gary Warner creates an improvised soundfield with his ‘aleatoric ensemble’ autonomous sound machines, a collection of modified turntables that spin ad-hoc bric-a-brac assemblages. Pia van Gelder (pictured) amplifies an electronic circuit as it is built in real-time. Under the moniker of “PvG sans PCB,” in these performances, van Gelder works on a breadboard with electronic components and additional found objects to demonstrate the electronic variabilities produced in the material world. Ben Denham and Sean O’Connell perform together with handmade synthesizer systems that sense and sonify barometric pressure and the flow of electrons through matter. Purchase your tickets to the symposium at the link in bio. — Pia van Gelder, 'sans PCB', 2021, performance, Collings Creative, image courtesy and © the artist
Loading...