One Man and His Shed

Scoop Homes & Art #29, Winter 2011
Anna Flanders | 30 Jun 2010

Stuart Elliott has a big shed. He also has a big dog, and has been known to do some big sculpture. However, he doesn’t feel the need to make a big impact on the world. “I don’t want to be a movie star,” he has stated.

Instead, this intensely thoughtful and considered man concentrates on his art in his big shed, with his big dog, out in Bakers Hill. It’s a little spot on the West Australian landscape that provides the environment and space in which he can create the art that has seen him become one of the State’s most important mid-career artists.

“There’s lots of staring: images, screens, writing, assorted phenomena,” he says of his day-to-day. “Lugging things, bending over benches or operating machinery, bit of food, infrequent binge vice, a little company, serial dog talking and much wondering.”

The staring is related to the wondering as he takes in the world and digests it; the lugging and the bending are while constructing his sculptures from wood, ceramic or steel, or all three and more. The food and binge vice? Well, a man has to live. And the ‘company and dog’ refer to his friends and his wolfhound–Alsatian–cross Rex: “He scares children – he is the size of a small horse and has a fabulous set of cutlery,” Stuart laughs.

Currently, this mode has him preparing for two exhibitions. One is his 18th solo show (working title The Gamekeeper) at Turner Galleries in 2011. “Some is installation works that I have been pushing around and work- shopping for about the past 18 months or so,” he says. Then there’s The Hollow City, a collaborative video project for which he is working on sets, buildings, vehicles and people to film. To debut in November at Junction Gallery, in Midland, it’s a follow-up to working on The Underpass Motel (Turner Galleries, October-November 2009) with similarly ‘reclusive artists’, including Patrizia Tonello and Graham Taylor. “They have got the band back together,” he says.

And he has recently completed a residency at the Holmes à Court Gallery. It was a public arena for this self-confessed recluse, but one that he says he enjoyed. “It’s not like I am in the front window at Myer,” he laughs. However, with an aversion to city life and an upcoming show entitled The Hollow City, what is his relationship with urban environs?

“I live where I do because I can interact with the world at a measured rate,” he says. “It takes me time to digest stuff. I need to think about things, stare at trees and night skies… People dropping in, the surfeit of noise, traffic, light and hubbub, well, I lived like that for a while, but now I find it suffocating.”

It’s this solitude that he guards “very jealously”, saying it gives him time to “dialogue with his artwork”. However, perhaps it’s also a learned way of living. As a three-to-four-year-old child he contracted polio, which left him with a chest condition and asthma until his early teens. It meant he spent time at home, alone, due to illness. “I missed a lot of school, so I was always in the ‘dumb’ class, but also I spent a long time on my own. Time on your own is important for running ideas.”

He grew up in isolated Gooseberry Hill (“which in the early 60s was dirt roads and bushfires, now it’s Nedlands with bumps…”) before leaving school at 16 to become a ‘sparky’, then heading to the Pilbara to work in the mines. Riding his motorbike between the North West and Perth gave him plenty of time with his thoughts, and instilled in him a memory of colour. “Wildflowers on the side of the road or the first traffic lights when you got to Geraldton... all that colour [was a visual shock] when you are used to living in a spectrum that ranges from red to brown.”

Because of this or maybe because his art is laced with some form of structural history, he works in an eroded colour, a subdued palette of Outback hues and rust, of dust-swept equipment and left-to-age ruins. “There’s something about the poetics of ruins. If I were a moneyed person in the 18th century, I’d have a backyard full of follies,” he says.

He also loves pieces of wood once used as patterns to create machinery components. “They have the most intricate, fabulous woodwork, someone has made it with incredible precision and they cost an arm and a leg. But the machinery it is suited to changes... this thing goes from being precious to baggage,” he explains. “I finish up with a lot of those things and there is something tragically noble about them.”

He is drawn to history. A major influence was a trip to Munich in the 1980s, looking out over a fog-bound city to see buildings that had been bombed, then rebuilt after World War II under Allied supervision. “It was haunting. I still carry ghosts of Munich with me,” he says. “They painstakingly rebuilt the town on top of the broken stumps of the original architecture… but the old masonry was what I was seeing in the fog. And it was this thing about seeing the ghost in the ruins behind the modern Munich.” He has since been intrigued about how structures create feelings.

His work has been influenced by a series of epiphanies or breakthroughs prior to then and beyond. The first was when he applied a set of investigative tools to a drawing and the second was when he took a photograph of a plasticine figure inside a masonite building. Both were methods used at art school and both are tools he uses today in his artistic process.

Two other key moments were making a small African-informed figure in his final year of art school in 1980, and, in 1983, an installation, which he says took his work to another level. “It is rare that I haven’t thought of my object work, at least, without greater context since.” Today, he remains strongly influenced by ancient African and Egyptian work. He says it carries with it a ‘feel’ of its cultural or historical significance. He aims to emulate that with works that have some type of nostalgia to them.

A review of his work by the late Murray Mason in the early to mid 80s was another turning point, with the realisation that, “whatever I was doing, someone else whom I did not know was taking it seriously”. They were indeed, with Stuart’s work selected for the 1984 Australian Sculpture Triennial at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Based in Kununurra at the time, Stuart paid for the sculpture’s transport himself, a financially crippling endeavour. However, the offer of a teaching job in Broome and the reimbursement of those funds paved the way for his fiscal renaissance and a new era in his art.

There followed exhibitions at the Art Gallery of WA in 1985 (Graven Images) and 1986 (The Peace Show); representation at the International Small Scale Sculpture Triennial in Budapest in 1987; a book on his art by Dr David Bromfield (Fakeology, 2004); a residency in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 04 (his third after residencies in Mundaring and Esperance); a Fellowship from artsWA in 2005; and a show at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (Cross Currents) in 2007, and more.

The ‘sparky in the Pilbara’ had moved from art school student in Claremont – “I was very opinionated, very truculent and not terribly subscriptive to the fashionable mainstream left” – to established WA artist. His work today is in Holmes à Court, Stokes, AGWA, Curtin, Edith Cowan University, University of Western Australia and Bank- West collections, plus overseas. And he’s an established lecturer, teaching at the UWA, Claremont Art School, Curtin University and, today, at Polytechnic West’s Midland campus.

“Humans are ideas factories and art schools, at their best, multiply that to uncountable levels,” he says of teaching. “And sometimes, not too often, you can be in a lecture and say or do something that acts like a last brick in an already substantial or precarious, but always unique, wall. You are there and you see that light go on. Man, it is like no other experience.”

He believes there is more pressure placed on art students these days due to the number of private galleries that have emerged in Perth since the mid 90s. “When I graduated from art school in 1980… there were no commercial galleries interested in anything other than flogging commodities. You pretty well knew: ‘An arts career? Don’t make me laugh.’ So, you finished up getting a part-time job and getting a warehouse and working in there because you wanted to make art.”

Today, he says, Perth has a “much more appreciative establishment because it does take its culture seriously”. However, it also dangles the carrot of a career. “If we aren’t careful, we will produce artists who want to be ‘movie stars’,” says Stuart, pointing to artists who focus on pieces that will bring in the big bucks, rather than on making art.

There has been no motivation other than art in Stuart’s life. He was part of the movement, led by his Claremont School of Art lecturer Tony Jones, that saw sculpture change in WA forever (“previous to that it was all bronze nudes”). And having come from the bush, he had to be inventive in his materials, learning organic ways to manipulate wood and steel, struggling with his path from tradie to artist, a path that continues today to be one of discovery and creativity.

“I like to think I have gotten better at what I do. Certainly, I am more informed, more technically capable and more self-assured. Never have I had the slightest doubt that making art is what I wanted to do,” he says. “A university lecturer said to me while I was an undergraduate: ‘Sculpture is a way of coming to know the world.’ Sounded pretty thin to me at the time, but in the decades since, I’ve yet to get a better version.”

Stuart is represented by Turner Galleries (08) 9227 1077, turnergalleries.com.au.