Sophie Bannan is an artist, writer and educator based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Working multimodally across image and object making, performance and text, Bannan develops methodologies for appropriation and archive production specific to art historical, genealogical and queer subjectivities.
Her work explores subjective histories, primarily using lens-based practices and archival material. Following the Ōtautahi earthquakes she undertook extensive research into the intersecting architectural, craft and family histories in this post-quake context. Working closely with her grandfather Maurice Mahoney, who designed much of the city’s brutalist architecture, she documented both his public work and his amateur pottery in a series of photographs, moving image works, ceramics, site-specific events and text. Bannan has since worked with similarly site-specific subjectivities in Sendai (Japan), and Waiuta (Te Tai Poutini).
More recently, Bannan has been working with found photographs and films from her own archives and those of her father and grandparents. Her photographic collages include media that ranges from iPhone photographs to analogue and historic image making methods, and borrow visual languages from Judson Dance Theatre, 1980s lesbian magazines, poems about plants, recipes with chicken, and photographs of lovers. She generates new subjectivities of domestic joy, queer time and communities of practice.
For the Gus Fisher’s Changing Room Programme, Bannan presented the exhibition Chicken Poems alongside, and in collaboration with, her brother Oscar. Their collaborative moving image work, The Ballet, (2025) uses existing dance films made of and by the siblings over the past thirty years. The work is a meeting a point between their preoccupation with the ready-made and the performing body. It offers various lenses through which to view their wider body of work, shifting in register from Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A, first performed in 1978, to Tumblr era bedroom self-takes.
Bannan’s exhibitions include Now, Then Next: Time and the Contemporary (Christchurch Art Gallery 2019-20); ‘Cyan ides’ (RM, 2020); A Wandering Thing (with Joshua Harris-Harding, The Physics Room, 2019); and Thinking About Building (The Physics Room, 2014). Bannan completed her MFA at University of Canterbury under the external supervision of Chris Kraus, attended Mountain School of Art (Los Angeles), was a University of Auckland doctoral candidate, and presently teaches secondary school photography and art history. She was a co-founder of artist-run galleries North Projects (Christchurch) and Personal Best (Auckland), wrote a gardening book, and is an occasional contributor to art publications.
Awards and Residencies
2026 Michele Whiteclife Art Writing Prize, runner up
2025 The Changing Room commission recipient
2018 University of Auckland Doctoral Scholarship
2016 Mountain School of Art, residency/ artist-run art school, Los Angeles, USA
2015 University Prize, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
2015 Ethel Susan Jones Fine Arts Travel Scholarship
2015 Bickerton-Widdowson Scholarship
2014 New Zealand Women’s Institute Scholarship
2014 Select exhibition winner, University of Canterbury
2014 National Contemporary Art Award, finalist
2011 Wallace Trust Art Awards finalist
2011 Partnership Appeals Award, University of Auckland
2010 Partnership Appeals Award, University of Auckland
2010 Denise Gerard Scholarship, Elam School of Fine Arts
2010 Senior Excellence Prize, Elam School of Fine Arts
Solo and Two Person Exhibitions
2025 Chicken Poems, with Oscar Bannan, Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland
2025 The Ballet, Masons Screen Pōneke
2020 Cyan ides, RM, Auckland
2019 A Wandering Thing, with Joshua Harris, The Physics Room, Christchurch
2018 Hut for a Sensuous Gold Miner, with Daegan Wells, Meanwhile Gallery, Wellington 2016
2016 Did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding? with Dan Nash, RM Gallery, Auckland
2015 Backwater, North Projects, Christchurch
2014 The Optimists, with John Ward-Knox, Blue Oyster Project Space, Dunedin
2013 Variations, Knight Street Art Space, Melbourne
2013 I am in the middle, Rearview Gallery, Melbourne
Group Exhibitions
2026 Mothermother, Sanderson Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau
2026 Home Studio, curated by Daegan Wells, Obectspace Ōtautahi
2024 Pride, The End Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau
2019-20, Now, Then Next: Time and the Contemporary, curated by Lara Strongman, Christchurch Art Gallery
2016 Precarious Balance, Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch
2014 Select, University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts Gallery
2014 Thinking About Building, curated by Melanie Oliver, The Physics Room, Christchurch
2014 National Contemporary Art Award finalist exhibition, Waikato Museum
2013 Ferrari Saloon, Ferrari Gallery, Auckland
2013 Raffle, Strines, Melbourne
2011 Elam Graduate Exhibition, November 2011
2011 BYOUSB, Personal Best Gallery for Auckland Artweek, November 2011
2011 Wallace Arts Awards Finalist, Travelling Show, Dowse Arts Museum, Upper Hut; and Pah Homestead, Auckland
2011 Symptoms of Cyanosis, Showroom22, Auckland
2010 Do You Mind? Iron Bank, Auckland
2010 Watercolour Scholarship Finalists exhibition, George Fraser Gallery, Auckland
2010 Lomo/World, ProjectSpace B431, Auckland
2010 Takeaways, High Street Project, Christchurch
2009 100 Clams, High Seas Gallery, Auckland, December 2009
2009 Process, Projectspace B431, Auckland
2008 Shall We Set Fire to Each Other, Just to Get it Going, 448 Gallery, Auckland
Artist-Run Initiatives
2015–16 North Projects, Ōtautahi artist-run project space, co-founder
2012–13 Strines Art Project Space, founder and director, Naarm Melbourne
2010–11 Personal Best, Tāmaki Makaurau artist-run initiative, co-founder
2009 448 Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau artist-run gallery, co-founder
Public Collections
Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna o Waiwhetu
University of Canterbury
sophiebannan@gmail.com