Artists

ARTIST BIO:

Christchurch

Ellie Gray born in Dunedin, and now based in Christchurch, where she is a Painter and Secondary School teacher. Ellie graduated from the Dunedin School of Art in 2014 with a Bachelor of Visual Arts, majoring in Painting.

Her paintings are a response to the intriguing construction and finishings of residential structures, which are full of texture, line, and play of shadow.

She has a fascination with the relationship between colours and geometry, and how these are interpreted by the viewer. By spending time with the works, her aim is for the viewer to slowly uncover the subject matter as if they are trying to identify a visual code.

The highly geometrical works, depicted in primary colours with exacting precision in every line, manage to appear as both flat, two-dimensional pattern and as a three-dimensional illusion, propelling forward from the picture plane. Gray plays a clever game with the eye, unsettling any preconceived ideas of what exactly it is looking at, alluding to the desire for the subject to remain unresolved and open to interpretation. Laura Elliott.