Rachel Ellison at Newspace

Rachel Ellison Newspace Till Sunday 29 July 2001

Ellison, originally from Wollongong, now in Rozelle, decided to study art at a tertiary level in Year 11. Rachel is sure that if she wasn't at Art School then she would be doing something very different. She has never done sculpture before. Rather she came into Art School with a painting portfolio. Now she is investigating sculpture and says, "I love it now." and believes that her choice to study art has been worth taking the chance. Her Uni Studio and the peers she shares this studio with have made a great difference to her current happiness. At this stage in her career she is interested in collecting and representation and how these human phenomenons echo and impact on her identity as an artist learning about art in Rozelle in 2001.

Her exhibition is a poignant self-examination of her role as an artist and how she fits into a social schema where there is a place to belong.

Her use of different objects is largely symbolic:

One installation is a small white walled cabinet that houses large keys, hanging from a wrack. In front of this wall cabinet, like a shelf, is a heavily embossed cushion with a small key wrapped in satin and strips of cloth draped over the cushion that look something like the cloth draped over a Catholic chalice. Rachel sees the keys as symbols of power. They speak of the desire behind ownership, the being inside/outside dynamic of having or not having power, This is linked to the notion of being inside architecture, of our human habit of surrounding ourselves with our own unnatural structures and speaks of our estrangement from nature as it is. Rachel sees excessive desire as leading us away from nature, in the way that cities sprawl over the land, obliterating nature.

The lushest object in her show is a giant velveteen rose that stands in a tiny pot, almost smaller in diameter than its stem. One metaphor is the sense of producing something larger than one expects, larger than is originally provided for. The sown flower refers to craft and flower, the realm of traditional women's art and as such is optimistic as it outgrows but still flourishes in its tiny pot. The work is also a statement about the mechanics of desire, the desire to contain and manage, attributed to the creators of the pot. It states a will to contain the feminine subject where the creator sees herself as the subject that has been contained.

This crafted heart is the problematised realms of the masculine and feminine where the traditional scientific representation of the heart has been crafted and stuck full of pins. It's display incorporates the themes found in the diametrically opposed masculine and feminine forces in our culture, evident in the evolution of Ellison's velveteen rose.

Ellison also features collections of spoons from colonial centres and tea cups sporting ubiquitous oriental designs. By displaying these objects she hopes to play up the farce of Western culture presenting the same face everywhere it spreads.