STEPHEN ELLIS, UNDERTOW I, 2025, coloured pencil on Fabriano paper, 700 x 960 mm
Sanderson presents 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 has 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 Clairbeach 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.
Opening event: Tuesday 29th April, 5.30-7pm
