Sophie Dumaresq

About the work

“What’s in a Postcard? Baby, I just wanted to make you smile” is a series of cinematic endurance performances where the artist Sophie Dumaresq attempts to pull her handmade 100 kilo, 5 metres long mechanical great white shark (Baby) up a hill in order to share the phenomena of a sunset with the shark.

During the first four recorded iterations of the work, the artists dog Frankie accompanied the artist, witnessing, sharing and recording the performances equipped with their own camera. The project revolves around the romantic and comic sublime, looking into the beauty to be found within the absurd, including the absurd joy of sharing in this existence and our need to share and connect with others.

For the Canberra Art Biennale, Dumaresq has been commissioned to perform a new iteration of the work that will be the first ever live performance of the work with a human audience. The performance will take place just before and during sunset at the National Arboretum, Kamberri/Canberra, Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, Australia.

The work also encapsulates Dumaresq practice as both a maker and a performer. Demonstrating how their practice as a maker informs and embodies her practice as a performer and vice versa. The work uses the slapstick materiality of the shark and the physical performance and in all its absurdity to question how different beings, bodies and brains all experience things differently.

The performance will be accompanied with live music by the musician Marelene Claudine Radice. Radice created and scored the sound for the four previous iterations of the work in collaboration with Dumaresq based on prompts. The prompts were based on themes of Romantic longing and research into the different vibrational frequencies which sharks and other beings communicate through which the human being is consciously unaware.

About the artist

Sophie Dumaresq is an interdisciplinary artist who brings perspectives of absurdity, queerness and humour to creative, critical robotics, automata and mechanics. Working across photography, video installation, sculpture and performance, her work explores what it is to try and communicate in a universe filled with beings whose brains, existence and or bodies are built inherently differently to that of your own. Her artistic practice explores what it means to share joy, love and laughter in our relationships with both other humans and non-humans. She seeks to bring voices of inclusion and difference to future and emerging cultures of robotics, automation and computation.

Sophie graduated from ANU honours first in her year in 2023, winning the Peter and Lena Karmel Anniversary award for the most outstanding graduating body of work from the Australian Nation University’s School of Art and Design. She was also awarded a Peter and Lena Karmel Visual Arts Honours Scholarship during her honours candidacy, as well as three 2023 Emerging Artist Support Scheme Awards.B

In 2023 she also undertook a Digital Fellowship through Creative Australia and Creative New Zealand. During this fellowship she was mentored by world renowned performance artist Stelarc. She is the ACT artist for the 2024/25 NextWave Kickstarter program. She is also one of the 2024 nominated and selected annual Hatched flagship artists.