Stuart Elliott is one of Perth's most important senior artists.
His artistic career spans some 40 years, and includes such milestones as being bestowed a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010 by Artsource, 20 solo exhibitions and over 150 group exhibitions in venues as prestigious as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria. He is widely acknowledged as being an influential lecturer, exquisitely articulate, and enormously generous with his art, curating, writing and exhibitions skills. The late John Stringer stated, "I think, without any question, Stuart is one of the most significant artists we have in Western Australia". [ABC TV, Stateline, 06.02.2004]
The accolades continue. In 2013 Stuart Elliott was selected as the third Syndicate commissioned artist. 'The Syndicate' is a consortium of like minded art patrons who have gathered under the stewardship of West Australian art collector and philanthropist Lloyd Horn. The ten members each contribute an equal sum of money over a two to three year period for the commissioning a carefully selected sculptor to develop a suite of ten life sized, human figure focused works. Elliott's resulting body of work, The Council, was completed in 2017. It was first shown in Lloyd Horn's home town, at the Bunbury Regional Art Gallery, and it now debuts in Perth at Turner Galleries.
Elliott is no mainstream artist. His work for several years has been rooted in his concept of 'Fakeology', a unique philosophy about making museum like objects that are encoded with cross cultural ideas. Inspired by urban decay, African fetishes, and mementos of power and beauty, Elliott succeeds in creating his own parallel world where the familiar becomes the unfamiliar, a fake archaeology.
"Fakeology began, for Stuart, as a means to make art in a vacuum, by shifting it to a parallel but strangely familiar universe... Fakeology is a profound and unique insight, a magnificent achievement. I know of no other artist, anywhere, who, as all things solid melted into air, insisted that art must remain dense, three dimensional, that it can and must compel reality - intractable social reality - back into existence through memory, myth, communal decency and the exuberance of a confident, successful art." (David Bromfield, Fakeology, 2004, p178)
The Council is Elliott's most triumphant feat of Fakeology. For these imposing sculptural works, the back line of a set of life size chess pieces has been the departure point. Ten council members, sitting on high stools, stare menacingly across the room at each other. Although their forms are consistent with that of a human - or bipedal primate at least - the exact nature of the contents of their clothing or even the precise purposes of that clothing is intended to remain ambiguous. Not monstrous as such, but certainly enigmatic or unsettling as high office generally is.
Photography: Eva Fernandes
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