BRODIE ELLIS

Born 1979 in Lismore, Australia. Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.

Brodie Ellis, Umbra:Penumbra:Antumbra, 2010 (video still), two-channel video installation, steel, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Brodie Ellis, Ocea Sellar

Brodie Ellis is an artist working with large sculptural and video installations that explore natural resources and technology in poetic and evocative ways. Ellis studied Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne and draws from her background in theatrical set design to create works that transform raw industrial materials into beautiful, evocative and atmospheric environments.

Ellis’s interest in social and environmental issues is seen in works such as The Super Pit (2008), which takes its title from Australia’s largest open-cut goldmine in the mining town of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. The Fimiston Open Pit, commonly known as the Super Pit, sustains the town, while Kalgoorlie’s neighbours bear traces of the mining industry’s progress and abandonment – ghost towns, empty buildings, neglected machinery and obsolete mines. In Ellis’s installation a large, blown-out tyre, segments of continuous tracks discarded from a bulldozer, a swathe of cracking clay, and pine armatures simulating mining machinery accompany footage of the site. This presents a fragile echo of the mine’s impressive reality, evoking a present and continuing future in which human and material obsolescence is intrinsically linked to technological progress.

For the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Ellis presents a new installation entitled Umbra:Penumbra:Antumbra. She uses video, light and sound in an attempt to convey a sensory memory of the solar eclipse that the artist witnessed on 22 July 2009 from the island of Yakushima in southern Japan. Ellis filmed the six-and-a-half-minute event – the longest solar eclipse to occur in over 100 years – from the heritage-listed Yakusugi Forest in Yakushima; chosen as the site where it was to be visible for the longest duration. Experienced in a darkened, industrial building on Cockatoo Island, Ellis’s installation is a three-dimensional layering of a series of ellipses that cast shadows and define territories amidst sensory chaos. It is an experiment with light, sound and proximity; exploring depth of field, the mechanics of vision and our sense of personal space as it is affected by our perception of the horizon. The space houses two projections and a polished steel sculpture, while sounds wash around the viewer/listener; the total effect being to gently warp the body’s interpretation of distance, scale and motion on a level below cognition, that speaks to the muscles, nerves and cells of the audience. The result is an immersive and intense experience and a reverent study of nature’s power advocating an engagement with moment and place.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2008 ‘The Super Pit’, Conical Inc., Melbourne, Australia
2008 ‘Rigorous Geometry’, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, Australia
2007 ‘Spaceship 1’, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, Australia
2006 ‘Swarming Behaviour’, West Space, Melbourne, Australia
2005 ‘Post-Urban Reliquary’, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 ‘New 09’, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia
2008 ‘Gertrude Studio Artists Exhibition’, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, Australia
2008 ‘The Ecologies Project’, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia
2007 ‘Too Near, Too Far’, Careof Gallery, Milan, Italy
2007 ‘New Entry Videoteca’, Care of Gallery, Milan, Italy

Selected Bibliography

Geraldine Barlowe and Kyla McFarlane (eds.), The Ecologies Project, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2008
Unanda Blair, ‘From Earth to Sky and Beyond: The Long Drive Home’, New 09, exhibition catalogue, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2009
Jacqueline Doughty, ‘5 Cool Hunter Predictions’, Australian Art Collector, issue 47, 2009
Helen Johnson, The Super Pit, exhibition catalogue, Conical Inc., Melbourne, 2008
Alex Martinis Roe, ‘Descent into the Pit’, Runway, issue 11, The Invisible Inc., Sydney, 2008