Ella Sutherland: FOLDS

17 October - 14 November 2020

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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