An
unbearded, athletic
youth

Working within a well-worn stream of representation, Ella Sutherland uses the visual vocabulary of ancient Greece to look at the relationship between the formal, physical and linguistic gesture. An unbearded, athletic youth negotiates the responsibility of a graphic system across contexts; appropriating, transcribing and collating to figure the relationship between communicative language and representational objects.

An unbearded, athletic youth coaxes a graphic sensibility to operate in a different register; the planned and the erratic are brought together to complement and complicate a rational system. The poetic and the incomplete invert familiar patterns, making experience of the known strange and filled with options.

Where does one begin, making our way through this riot of voices tumbling forth from our own histories, your history, history’s history. It’s a real fruit salad of surfaces out there, but how does once describe a voice whose time we cannot see? Nothing is happening, but I feel like it could have. If nothing is definite, everything is possible; what we are looking at is an alphabet of potential.

Ella Sutherland is a Christchurch-based artist and graphic designer. She recently graduated with an MFA from Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury and is a co-founder of Dog Park Art Project Space (2012-). Recent projects include Seeing Which Way the Wind Blows with Matt Galloway, split/fountain, Auckland, 2013; Popular Brands to Steal for New Artists Show, Artspace, Auckland, 2012; and This That with Dave Marshall, Dog Park Art Project Space, Christchurch, 2012