Nicole Ellis: Fabrications
February 19 – April 11
Image: Nicole Ellis, Erasure 3, 2018, mixed media, 82.5 x 119 cm
This exhibition covers 30 years of the Sydney-based artist Nicole Ellis’ art-making. It surveys her rich and complex involvement with collage, assemblage and found materials. Fastidiously selected textiles comprise the “palettes” and provide tones and textures that she moulds into consistently beautiful, poised, luminous compositions.
“I enjoy incidental elements,” Ellis explains, “flaws, traces of human touch and gesture, and I seek out different assemblage techniques through experimentation and research. I enjoy the qualities of the worn, aged, broken, torn, the seeming casual, the imperfect, traces of paint and reversals.”
However, as critic Anna Johnson has observed, Ellis’s method of generating images is “riven with quiet reversals”:
“Post-objective and anti-descriptive, her work involves the cohesive life of the materials themselves, and the cleaving point where surfaces meet. Here is ‘painting’ that dwells in residue, damage and remains. The results cannot be abstracted from the process. They are the process.”
Nicole Ellis, Fabrications is curated by Tony Oates
The Drill Hall Gallery is open to the public with normal opening hours, Wednesday to Sunday 10-5pm.
We look forward to seeing you again and ask that before visiting the gallery you read our
essential information for visitors to the Drill Hall Gallery in relation to COVID-19.
Don’t forget to watch our news page, Facebook and Instagram for new and engaging content related to our 2021 program of exhibitions, the ANU Art Collection, Drill Hall Gallery musicians and more.
For ANU related COVID-19 advice click here
For COVID-19 safe university guidelines, relevant to all ANU community, including visitors, click here
The Drill Hall Gallery acknowledges the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, the traditional custodians of the Canberra region, and recognises their continuous connection to culture, community and Country.