BEACHED AS BRO... (I LOVE YOU)
Sophie Dumaresq: Beached as Bro... (I love you) (2025)
Sophie Dumaresq’s latest work is mischievous and unapologetically visceral. Beached as Bro… (I love you) (2025), commissioned for Blaze at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space and developed at ANCA Studios, commands an audience. Funded by Next Wave, the piece frays distinctions between creature and performer, endurance and exhaustion, as Dumaresq inhabits Sweetie Pie—a pink-interior, part-robotic, part-sculptural shark. The work explores a delicate balance between control and surrender.
Sharks and Cherry Pie
When I met Sophie, the first thing I noticed was the blue shark pendant hanging from her necklace. She talks about sharks with a little awe and total devotion. “Sharks are older than trees; they’ve survived all extinction events. They’re these amazing primordial creatures that regulate ocean acid levels, which lets algae grow, which produces 70% of our oxygen.”
Sweetie Pie is an 80-kilo, sevenish-metre-long shark. “Even though she looks like a great white, she’s actually based more on Emma, a tiger shark I love from YouTube. Tiger sharks roll their eyes back when they get pats—Sweetie Pie does the same. That was the only robotic part, the eyes.” She pulls one of those eyes out of her red handbag while talking, like it’s a totally normal thing to carry around. “It fell out at the performance. I’m going to stick it back in after this.”
The name Sweetie Pie came the day David Lynch died. A friend brought cherry pie to Sophie’s studio in his honour, and that same day, she crawled inside the shark for the first time. “And because the inside kind of looks like a pie.” Lined with pink fire-retardant insulation—the same type used on the California wildfires while Sweetie Pie was being built. “Making the work was just weird grief, because the song at the centre of the work is Don't Worry Baby by The Beach Boys. And as I was making the show, all the Californian fires happened, and I was using the same fire retardant, it's color coded pink, being dumped on houses in LA.”
The performance
Dumaresq’s friends Tom and June supported her in the 48-hour lead-up to the performance. “I feel like that’s important to acknowledge—I was alone inside the shark, but it was only possible because I had a community around me.”
The gallery was 28 degrees that night. No ventilation. The audience was locked in, watching her physically pump the mechanical aspects of the shark for the jaw and tail to move. Beads of sweat started forming on her back, her hair getting stickier as the performance went on. “I was listening to how people were reacting. The choice to take me out of the shark was based on how much people were starting to freak out watching me get more and more exhausted.”
Sweetie Pie is modular, with gaps between the gills, tail, and jaw that gave her a little airflow—but not much. Sophie describes the work as a kind of exchange. “There’s this energy transfer that happens. The audience has to work with you, and how successful the performance is depends on how much they’re willing to engage. It’s kind of like working with robotic components. They become another part of the system.” People were locked in on Dumaresq’s performance, one gallery-goer said, “This makes me feel so uncomfortable, but in the best way.”
Creator and Creature
Sophie knows how to move with the work. “The head did kind of break during the performance, and no one would have heard it but me, but that changed the way I was moving with her. And when I go in and repair her, I know what I’ll do differently because I now know how my body moves inside.”
There’s no way to stage this kind of work without full physical commitment. “I didn’t realise just how much the heat would impact me.” The structure of the shark, built with pink fire-retardant insulation, created an unintended microclimate inside the sculpture. But Dumaresq certainly keeps up her fitness for her art—running up Black Mountain, bed-of-nails meditation, and unicycling. “I slept for 20 hours after the performance.”
In many ways, the performance mirrored the way animals exist in artificial habitats. “There’s this sunfish in an aquarium in Japan that got sick because it didn’t have visitors,” she explains. “So they made these little paper cutouts to trick it into thinking it had an audience.” Her relationship with aquariums is complicated—drawn to their beauty, disturbed by their containment. Sophie describes it as rejecting billionaire logic, the idea that the solution to Earth’s problems is space travel. “Like we can just start over somewhere else. Sweetie Pie is a vessel built for this planet.”
Her friends call Sweetie Pie an artisanal shark. Sophie laughs at that. “Physically, you can sometimes see my fingerprint or my hair in her, because I made her. So, she’s actually a reflection of my body. And then she performs with my body. She’s not some smooth, factory-produced object.”
Where to next?
From concept to first performance, Beached as Bro… (I love you) took a year. But Sweetie Pie isn’t done. She and Sophie will be heading to Melbourne later this year. “Going forward, I might replace different parts of her—maybe with more sustainable materials. I wasn’t able to incorporate as many ocean plastics into this version as I wanted, but I’ll fix that.” She’s planning a trip to Durras, where she has family connections, to hunt for more plastics.
Mischief-making is core to Dumaresq’s practice. Her sculptures don’t sit quietly in a gallery—they move, break, demand maintenance. Sweetie Pie isn’t static—she’s an evolving entity. “As she travels, bits of her will need to be replaced, updated.”
