Join Sanderson to celebrate the opening of Buried Giant by Stephen Ellis. All welcome.
To request an exhibition catalogue please contact the gallery via email - info@sanderson.co.nz
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 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.
Read the full exhibition essay here.
Price
- Free - All Welcome
Date
- Tue 29 Apr
Time
- 5:30 pm — 7:00 pm
Address
- Osborne Lane, 2 Kent Street
- Newmarket
- Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, 1023
Join Sanderson to celebrate the opening of Buried Giant by Stephen Ellis. All welcome.
To request an exhibition catalogue please contact the gallery via email - info@sanderson.co.nz
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 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.
Read the full exhibition essay here.
