Nicole Ellis: Fabrications(Published Feb 2021, 150 pages, 79 illus, Drill Hall Gallery Publications)
The monograph Nicole Ellis Fabrications has been published to coincide with a survey exhibition of the artist’s work at the Drill Hall Gallery, ANU, Canberra, curated by Tony Oates (19 February – 11 April 2021).
Fabrications covers thirty years of art-making by Sydney-based artist Nicole Ellis. It reviews her rich and complex involvement with collage, assemblage and found materials. Fastidiously selected textiles comprise the artists ‘palettes’ and provide the tones that she moulds into consistently beautiful, poised, luminous compositions.
As Anna Johnson notes in her essay, ‘Nicole Ellis has found a way to generate an iconography based on echoes. Her work is riven with quiet reversals; the surface prefaced over the paint. Texture is generated by chance and colour by stain. If you look for her mark, it is there as a kind of inverted presence. She is a painter without need of a brush. Instead, her use of paint is adhesive and submerged, presented as a specter, a fragmented relief or a by-product … Here is “painting” that dwells in residue, damage and remains. The result cannot be detached from the process. It is the process.’
Fabrications also features a text by Terence Maloon and a conversation between the Nicole Ellis and Tony Oates which traces the artist’s upbringing, influences, working methods and motivations.
Extensively illustrated and sympathetically designed by Ricardo Filipe the publication parallels Ellis’ art in both content and materiality.
Nicole Ellis: Fabrications is available through the Drill Hall Gallery.
