Dr Emma Hicks, Nathan mudyi Sentance and Jodie Dowd
Dr Emma Hicks is a Sydney based artist, writer, and educator of Gamilaroi and European heritage, currently living on Cammeraygal Country. She has a multidisciplinary practice working across film, sculpture, installation, drawing, murals and writing.
Emma works in a responsive way to site or concept with connection to place and personal storytelling as recurring themes in her practice. Most recently collaborating with Merindah Funnell for the exhibition Echoes of light: Our connection through waterways at Artspace on the Concourse in Chatswood.
Nathan mudyi Sentance is a Wiradjuri writer, poet and librarian from the Mowgee clan, raised on Darkinjung Country. His creative practice is shaped by his work in libraries, archives and museums, where he advocates for community control over cultural heritage and the right of reply within colonial collections. Writing is both
resistance and care, responding to the misrepresentation, exclusion and erasure of First Nations people within institutional narratives.
Nathan’s poetry engages with memory, history and place, exploring the emotional and spiritual weight of archives and the persistence of Aboriginal presence in urban and institutional spaces.
His work has appeared in Meanjin, Cordite Poetry Review, The Guardian and the Sydney Review of Books. He received the 2024 Oodgeroo Noonuccal Poetry Prize and was a finalist in the 2025 Gosford Art Prize. He has exhibited with Jodie Dowd and Emma Hicks at the Coal Loader for Keep the Fire Burning and at Curl Curl Creative Space for For Our Elders.
Learn more: www.archivaldecolonialist.org
Jodie Dowd (she/her) is a Noongar (Menang, Gitja, Wangai, Ballardong) curator, basket weaver and writer who grew up on Gunai/Kurnai Country, Victoria, Australia. Jodie has called Gaimaragal Country on Sydney’s northern beaches home for the past five years.
Jodie spent over 15 years in the GLAM sector, working with First Nations community members to care for cultural belongings and support truth-telling through exhibitions and recording their right of reply.
Jodie currently works at the Australian Film Television and Radio School as the First Nations Community Engagement Manager and is excited to be working with and supporting the next generation of First Nations truth and story tellers.
The artists will be in residence at Alfred Street Artists Studios.
Photo by Jacquie Manning.
Learn more about Council's First Nations Artist Residency here.