Ivy
In 1928 Stephen couldn’t find her room, while another contemplated the new words needed to describe it
In the middle of the sixth arrondissement, in the middle of the night, a temple was reconfigured by invisible bodies
Ongoing and haphazard, names sprawl from A l’amitié to the edge of her map
Look at the names held by a cursive hand; look at space pour from the archive of bodies
Quoted from pages and stages; class, acts, sets and type find a home between Doric columns
295 lives arranged as architecture at the back of the garden
It is Friday night for sixty years;
still hard to find the d’or
—
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A City Given to Shade
Pages fold in like a minor fortress, turning inside out the logic of words
Climbing into the counter of an "o" or an "e" or an "a"
—the possibilities of letters seep through the body, arriving as shelter; like a shell
Is it a wall or a river?
She decides very clearly to leave clarity behind
The wood of the words are thick with an Elizabethan / Byzantine /
Neo-Baroque / Surrealist / Expressionist / Modernist accent
Writing into fog,
There goes the dismantled – Love has fallen off her wall,
does she think of privacy, obscenity, the bliss of a blush?
Keep climbing, keep the line moving
—
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House on the Brink of the Sea
By design, she turned away from the new, clear view, thinking about the politics of vision as she worked
Partial views, corners, the problem of windows
I reside inside of photographs she took of neither the inside or the outside for the interior section of a magazine
The progress and certainty articulated by nearby façades renders them illegible
No roads go here
It is difficult to see from one side of the room to the other;
the approach could be described as an indirect sentence
With walls like pleats, I imagine being the body around which the space folds
To some, this seems dishonest
I paint a house in a room of windows,
sweeping history’s sediment onto the plane
Light comes through, shadows are drawn out of shutters
Ella Sutherland (b. 1987, Auckland) works across the fields of visual art and publishing. Sutherland utilizes printing, painting, and installation to analyse and activate complex reading systems across built and digital environments. Her most recent work has drawn on extensive research periods spent in specialist archives, through which she continues to explore the relationship between language and social history and the evolving role of technology in disseminating thought.
Ella Sutherland (b. 1987) graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury, Christchurch (2012). Since graduating her work has been shown widely throughout New Zealand and international venues. Recent exhibition highlights include Letters, Auckland Art Fair 2020 Virtual Fair (2020); Friendship as a Way of Life, UNSW Galleries, Sydney (2020); Bookworks, Monash Museum of Art, Melbourne (2020); Returns, 12th Gwangju Biennale-Imagined Borders, Gwangju (2019) and Recto Verso, Objectspace, Auckland (2019). Sutherland has been awarded residencies with Banff Centre for Arts, Banff; International Art Space, Perth; and Art Gallery of New South Wales Studio, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. In October 2021, Sutherland will be an artist-in-residence for 12 months at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.
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