STEPHEN ELLIS

Buried Giant

Sanderson are pleased to present Buried Giant - an exhibition featuring a new suite of drawings by Stephen Ellis. 

Inspired by the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, this exhibition draws a parallel between Ishiguro’s giant – a deliberately forgotten conflict, and Ellis’ giant, which is Papatuanuku - the Green Man and mother nature, and the personification of mauri or the life force that lies ignored beneath our feet.

Ellis’ recent residency at the Dunedin School of Art, Ōtepoti, 2025 served as a platform for the artist to research and produce a suite of drawings that explore themes of solastalgia and climate grief. Solastalgia is the distress caused by environmental degradation - the word implies a tarnishing of memories, while closely resonating with the feeling of nostalgia.

Buried Giant explores the unacknowledged grief for lost landscapes and memory, both current and ancestral. Anyone who has witnessed the shifting landscape of Ōtepoti Dunedin’s St Clair beach over the past twenty years will have a visceral understanding of this feeling; a feeling stunningly captured in Ellis’ enigmatic Undertow I. In this artwork, found objects stand in for the iconic groynes that once defined the landscape of St Clair. The groynes were an engineering initiative constructed in 1902 to manage sand flow and erosion; the last of which were washed away by storms and high tides in 2021.

While researching funerary and elegiac imagery of 20th century New Zealand Painting, Ellis came across Dear Wee June at the Hocken Collections, a 1948 oil by Colin McCahon. This work refers to the grave of June Groves in the Port Chalmers Cemetery - June died in 1934 at the age of 4. Ellis’ Dear Wee June in Buried Giant references the landscape and epitaph of McCahon’s painting while engaging his visual vocabulary of anthropogenic overlay and the aesthetic traditions of the Sublime.

Throughout Buried Giant Ellis’ innovative use of raw pigment invites us to re-examine the evolving definitions of drawing, and the techniques that characterize the medium. Ellis is known for using a variety of mediums including the utilitarian ‘ball-point pen’, pencil and graphite. The artist’s previous suite of works in the 2023 exhibition Lamp Black, featured works made with the exhibition’s namesake – soot – which is an industrially processed pigment introducing a compelling element of climate irony. In Buried Giant the artist uses raw pigment, which is also industrially made, which glows in a lapis lazuli hue. Using a small brush the artist applied every line and mark in precision next to each other, in a technique the artist calls ‘drawing with a brush’.

Although the line is still central in this suite of drawings, the use of raw pigment and brushes allows for a visual exploration into materiality, texture, and surface interaction – underscoring the tactile nature of drawing but also emphasising the physicality of the medium - blurring the lines between drawing and painting.

“Drawing is how I think, see and speak. It’s how I explain the world to myself, and myself to myself. It’s my outlet and my inlet, my calm and my trouble, it creates and soothes my anxieties.” - Stephen Ellis

Through Ellis’s research into elegiac imagery from twentieth century regionalist New Zealand paintings and society’s symbolic representations of ‘mourners’, throughout Buried Giant the artist has rendered and captured the solastalgia felt by Aotearoa’s collective society. Lone figures stand and walk in various states of grief through scenes where earthly overwhelm presides. Brooding skies and stormy seas feature prominently amongst complex iconography, referencing both historical and personal allegory.

To be added to the preview list please email info@sanderson.co.nz