Stuart Elliott

Stuart Elliott

For more than three decades Stuart Elliott has contributed significantly to the visual arts in Western Australia, as a painter, sculptor, lecturer, curator and writer.

In 2010, he was honoured with an Artsource Lifetime Achievement Award, with Tony Jones OAM describing him as “arguably the finest sculptor working in this state (…) His art is characterised by a richness of detail, and superb craft skills, allied with powerful narrative.”

Adding to his accolades, Stuart Elliott has now been chosen as the third artist to be supported by The Syndicate, a collective of private arts patrons fronted by leading Bunbury-based collector Lloyd Horn.

• Stuart's profile

Stuart seeks to develop new skills in audio-visual artwork to complement his practice and transform his work into constructed images, objects and environments that will function in animated and performative dynamics.
 

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By Stuart Elliot

The project was originally conceived to involve a good amount of existing material and purpose built object based artwork combined with digitised and live components.  It (the Ignite video work) was intended to be a dedicated extension of a body of recent work titled The Facility.  The artwork of The Facility itself was originally intended to embody a series of tensions between that most immutable, fixed physical form, the architectural monolith, and that most fluid of human qualities, the recollection and interpretation of experience.  To meaningfully engage with these tensions using static art forms and even collage was quite difficult.   I had built a number of architectural forms as discrete units, in different styles though roughly equal in content.  Each of the units embodied a corresponding set of faulty recollections by persons effectively unknown.  Although there were few interiors as such, there were several suites of furniture.   Largely consisting of abstracted and hybridized chairs, they were working metaphors for people related to the Facility/s.  For this highly focused project a live action component has been realized to connect the variant versions of The Facility - an enigmatic figure that travels between them.  The figure’s trajectory is not intended to describe a classic linear narrative, but rather move in a way which may be more a journey of the subconscious; a reflection, digestion or reconstruction of events.

Each different Facility would suggest a different kind of reality, perhaps a different retelling of a single episode recounted from alternative perspectives.  A definitive purpose for The Facility itself is not made clear, although there is the scope to suggest any number of roles, especially those potentially contradictory.  Any of the Facilities may be multipurpose, mundane or mysterious.  

The video is intended to be a stand alone work but it is also intended to be able to be incorporated into another work or set of works. There is the intention to develop it to be deployed on different formats, in different contexts.  For instance, a screen may be mounted into the side of an architectural work (related to The Facility, or not, depending on conceptual goals) as an outdoor screen or kinetic billboard might appear.  Or on an even smaller screen inside a structure, being only able to be viewed with visually restricted access.  It may also be shown conventionally on a stand alone screen or that screen be part of furniture in a full scale fictional ‘TV room’.  Much depends on both the ultimate feel of the video itself and the potential offshoot versions of this core work. So far, there are many experimental paths in exploration.

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