Event Details
In Clearing, Ella Sutherland approaches the gallery’s foyer like an arena — a space of approach, threshold, and impression. The starting point for this exhibition was a collection of found silkscreens, originally used for screen-printing showjumping ribbons, built up over years to form an accidental archive of competition.
Clearing encompasses printed materials, painted surfaces, and sculptures that use and mimic the fixtures of equestrian showjumping, held in place by upright supports called “standards” — used to shape the course, testing horse and rider through a unique visual and spatial language. Sutherland is interested in impression: the physical impression left when two surfaces make contact in printmaking, the impression left by a person or event, and the broader question of what impression will be made in the act of crossing a threshold.
The artist works with and against the technical standards of printing (precise alignment, colour mixing, edition size) and of jumping (regulated heights, designs, specified dimensions). She includes failed proofs and misprints from her own studio, the cast-offs and rejects from sorting processes, and different methods of image transfer. In Clearing, Sutherland is concerned with what gets through and what doesn’t, in printing, in competition, and in language.
Ella Sutherland (b. 1987) is an artist and graphic designer from Aotearoa New Zealand who lives and works in Sydney. Working across the fields of visual arts and publishing, her work has been shown throughout Australasia and beyond. She was the recipient of the 2020 Creative New Zealand Berlin Visual Arts Residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, and in 2024 was a resident at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.
