Elinor Stanley
Through the year, Elinor looked at ideas of fiction and stylised tellings. Working with Marguerite Humeau on the first term project, Strong Currents, she explored the formation of legends and worked with Coral Brookes to create a scripted dialogue, blasted though megaphones at Botany Bay, giving voice to a disappointed lifeguard who had watched geological transformations for eons.
She was involved with the fictioning program, inviting practitioners such as Janice Kerbel and co-curated the Earthly Delights symposium which took place at Garden Gate community gardens over two days, looking at the natural world and our urge to both revere and control it.
Throughout the year she continued to develop her own practice, making paintings with glowing imagery in strange and filmic compositions. In these paintings, the figurative focus shifts: gestures are accentuated or obscured and certain elements are emphasised in scenes where overall coherence is disrupted. The paintings configure a weighted, biased gaze, a confused feeling of lurching – the viewer shares this vertigo.
For the final exhibition, Gut Feelings, she collaborated with composer Max Syed Tollan (www.maxsyedtollan.net) to create an antiphonic song. Song of Confusion revelled in the exuberance and idiocy of our human urge to give voice to inanimate things and to make mirrors of ourselves. In this work, a choir of countertenor orchids sing longingly of their metamorphosis.