New installation at Art Gallery

Artist Elliot Collins in his studio. Photo/Heather Liddell

Auckland based artist Elliot Collins is a poetic painter who operates in what he describes himself as a "world of free associations", frequently employing words to "visualise the stuff of thoughts" and explore the process of making meaning.

He is working on a new installation named The Weight of History for Tauranga Art Gallery.
Visitors to the gallery will see Collins at work over the next week as he will be painting straight on to the wall of the main gallery space.

His work can be experienced on a variety of scales from small canvases to large billboard-sized murals that engulf the viewer.

For the gallery, Collins has taken a slightly different approach, playing with ideas of scale in order to focus your attention on the small gestures.

Alongside his installation, Collins also has a work on a billboard outside the building.
"Elliot Collins has produced one of his signature installations for our atrium," says Tauranga Art Gallery director Karl Chitham.

"He combines elements that respond to his significant career to date with ideas he is exploring as part of his doctoral studies." Collins completed his Master of Arts and Design in 2007 and has exhibited steadily since then. In 2009 he was included in the exhibition of emerging painters at Christchurch Art Gallery and in May 2010 he produced a major site-specific work on a 14 metre-wide wall at City Gallery in Wellington.

Collins has also had a major show at The Dowse Art Museum and is represented by Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland.

Tim Melville writes, "In artworks like these, the viewer has a sense of the artist making himself vulnerable.

"The paintings are brave, beautifully considered and thought-provoking with a quality of romantic melancholy and knowing innocence that hits the heart with a flash of recognition.

"In a world preoccupied with irony and cynicism, Collins' works are loaded with hope, humanity and possibility."