ANNABELLE MCEWEN

Annabelle McEwen is an artist practising on unceded Gadigal Land. McEwen was awarded the Summer Fellowship at The State Library of NSW (2025), the Waverley Artist Studio Residency (2025), and The Ellen O’Shaughnessy Printmaking Award (2019). They were a finalist in The National Photographic Portrait Prize at The National Portrait Gallery (2024) among others. Their work has been exhibited widely, recently including solo exhibitions The Smartest Horse in the World at Ethan Frome and Dead Ringer at Tiles Lewisham. McEwen’s work has been acquired by The National Art School, The City of Sydney Art Collection, USQ Collection, RMIT, among others.

3. Annabelle McEwen, Embrace, 2025, silicone, protein powder, resin, 3D printed polylactic Acid clamps, 30 x 30 x 2 cm. $650.

4. Annabelle McEwen, Leg Press, Enfold, 2025, quartz, limestone, calcium sulfate, portland cement, polylactic acid on plasterboard and unbound masonry plinth, 30 x 35 x 16 cm. NFS.

5. Annabelle McEwen, Maculate [hard], 2025, image transfer on polylactic acid, 23 x 23 x 0.5 cm. $450.

McEwen’s practice employs photography, printmaking and digital technologies to examine the impact of digitally mediated experiences on users and the paralleling virtual gaze on the body. As content proliferates and digital computation extracts resources, the body has become a data asset. McEwen interrogates the surveilled, commodified and classified body to speculate on the way its extraction is shaping the user's agency.

McEwen probes the aesthetic potentials of contemporary technologies as means to expose, understand and visualise the power structures concealed. Using their body as a conduit for investigation, McEwen employs expanded methods of photography such as photogrammetry, gaussian splatting and other filtration to capture a virtual gaze of the body. They mediate the imagery, using computer-optics as a methodology and as an attempt to unveil the impact of algorithmically-curated streams on user’s autonomy and body.

McEwen extends the process by transposing the visual information into a physicality as an antithesis to the virtual images consumed via the luminous pixels upon screens. Using methods of printmaking, casting and more, McEwen constructs a solid corporeal statement standing unswerving amongst the fluid cycle of content and images we incessantly consume and generate.