Elliot Collins

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

Collins's texts are almost entirely his own words. Drawn from a kind of visual diary, they have to prove themselves "paint worthy" and usually been around for a couple of years by the time they make it into a painting. The font Hoeffler is consistently employed for its clear legibility and the words, described by curator Heather Galbraith as "equal parts brave, hilarious, earnest, melancholic, embarrassing, strident and poetic", jump from a painterly ground.

Collins' completed his practice-led Ph.D at AUT in 2018, researching memory markers in the landscape in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Reviewing a major 14 metre wide site-specific work commissioned for City Gallery Wellington, critic Mark Amery wrote: "Collins' text lives in the cryptic spaces between personal anecdote, literary flourish, art historical quotation and public address, diminishing in size as it runs down the wall, like movie credits or concentric circles left from a stone dropped in a pool. Underneath the text swatches of paint swarm up as a school of fish, like a letting go of modernism and all that is behind us, sent off into the ether by the force of the spinning of the globe."