Small Rituals | hand carved, handheld
Senden Blackwood
5 November – 12 December 2026
Location | Craft + Design Canberra, Level 1, North Building, 180 London Circuit, City ACT 2601
Opening Hours | Open Wednesday – Saturday | 12pm – 4pm
Entry | Free | No bookings required
Access | Wheelchair accessible, accessible parking, accessible toilets, off-street parking
SEE TALK
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. 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.
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Senden Blackwood is an Australian sculptor whose practice centres on hand-carved stone. Working through a process of careful reduction and refinement, he creates abstract forms inspired by the underlying structures of the natural world. His sculptures explore balance, movement and material presence, revealing the quiet tension and enduring beauty of stone through precisely resolved planes and lines, carved primarily from granite with forays into other volcanic, sedimentary and metamorphic stone.
Originally trained in Jewellery and Object Design at the Enmore Design Centre, Senden has developed a self-directed sculptural practice over the past twenty five years, exploring stone carving from handheld to the monumental. He has exhibited at Sculpture by the Sea in Bondi and Cottesloe, and his work is held in the Orange Regional Gallery collection. Alongside solo and group shows across Australia, he has completed public and institutional commissions and participated in international stone sculpture symposia and artist collaborations in Australia, the United States, Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand.
His awards include the inaugural Phillip Cox and Janet Hawley Acquisitive Prize (2010) and the NSW Artist Grant (2013). His work is held in public and private collections across Australia and internationally.
SEE ARTIST WEBSITE HERE
Images | Senden Blackwood, aki, 2026 | Photos courtesy of the artist