In an instant it's possible to experience contrasting perceptions; to be absorbed by a shaft of light on the wall whilst hearing the compression brakes of a truck gearing down the hill outside into town.

In a monochrome world of ice and tumbling skies there is an impulse to find the familiar, drawing analogies to a rainy city street or the droplets of water glistening on a cat's tail.

In the midst of blaring car horns and city lights, it's possible to find a silence that shifts focus to tiny details, to cracks in the pavement or a lost button in the gutter.

Ellis Hutch
written for The Poetic Lens exhibition publication 2014

email: ellishutchart@gmail.com
Instagram: @ellishutch_art      
@ellisonthephone
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About Ellis 

I’m an artist living and working on unceded Arrernte country. I draw, record, print, animate, perform and collaborate. I also write stories.

I'm endlessly curious, sometimes contrary, always wondering; intermittently social or reclusive. I love drawing people's attention to small things that go unnoticed, and giving them the opportunity to take time out from their daily lives to be immersed in art that feeds the senses and provokes deep, reflective thought.

My research interests have their basis in my fascination with how people establish social relationships and transform their environments in order to create inhabitable spaces. I am curious human obsessions with exploration, and the powerful pull of the most remote places, from Antarctica to the Moon. My practice-led PhD research Bringing Back New Worlds: A Poetics of Exploratory Space (completed in 2019 under the name of my alter ego Dr Kate M Murphy) investigated the ways in which Antarctic and Lunar explorers’ accounts of their experiences in extreme environments form foundations for a poetics of exploratory space.

In 2020, after investigating imaginative responses to remote and extreme environments over a number of years, I shifted focus to pay attention place I was born and living, Canberra; on Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri country, researching the effects of human intervention on the Molonglo river and the environmental impacts of ‘invasive species.’ In 2022 I moved to Mparntwe/Alice Springs and have been slowly forming connections with this new environment, connecting and collaborating with people; and learning the rhythms of this place. It is a significant life shift and feels like the beginning of something…

As well as working as a visual artist I teach as a lecturer at Charles Darwin University. My teaching interests span drawing, painting, printmaking sculpture, installation, video and performance art, and art theory.