Uncommon Exhibition Catalogue

Uncommon
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist

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and the Australia Council for the Arts - the Australian
Government's arts funding and advisory body.
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and surrounding areas. We honour and respect their
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and the contribution they make to the life of this city and
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Cover Image: Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Spider Flower , 2022 Photo: Lorena Carrington

Uncommon
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist
6 July - 26 August 2023
CRAFT + DESIGN CANBERRA

Image: Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Relic, 2021 Photo: James McArdle

Image: Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Storks Bill (Perched) 2022 Photo: James McArdle

Image: Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Windborne, 2022 Photo: James McArdle

UNCOMMON
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist
With a mixture of older and new work, Craft + Design Canberra presents Eliza-Jane Gilchrist's ongoing
practice of making abstract sculptures based on plant/seed forms using cardboard. Gilchrist combines
craft techniques such as paper-cutting, folding, paper-engineering, papier Mache, and pattern-making,
with non-traditional materials, creating works are unusual, accessible and thought-provoking.

Image: Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, The Rough Edges, 2023 Photo: James McArdle

Image: Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Scrobiculate, 2023 Photo: James McArdle

Image: Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Currajong, 2019 Photo: Lorena Carrington

UNCOMMON
By Dr. Caren Florence
At first glance these crafted organic shapes are pure
fantasy, a deliberate transformation from their angular box
origins, but there's no attempt to disguise the dun brown
colour of industrial cardboard. Combined with black notes,
the brown grounds everything, connects us back to earth.
It's a minimalist palette that supports the maximalism of
Gilchrist's imagination.
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist is a visual and performance artist
based in regional Victoria, who immigrated to Australia
from the UK in 2009. Part of her practice is puppetry,
which is unsurprising once we encounter her sculptural
work. It could easily be read as theatrical props for the
kind of story where the natural world triumphs over the
reckless damage of our rampant industrial complex. The
kind of story that saves everything with a beating heart.
The large-scale works vacillate between longing to
escape and staying to fix the problem. Trees bend into
boats, architectural elements look responsible at first
glance, legs want to spike down but then tentacle away,
launching into flight. Gilchrist has the skills of a furniture
maker, making the most of materials that are usually an
afterthought once you've unpacked a piece of furniture
that probably won't last your lifetime.
Her titles can shift us away from fantasy into science: what
I first saw as a tilting hat-stand reveals itself as a 'Burr'
(2023), a sticking point writ large. It is caught on the wind,
ready to burrow and itch into the even larger problem it
lands upon: what is to be done about the problems we
have created?
Suddenly, it actually is that story where the natural world
triumphs, whether we're looking at everyday shapes or
objects that are wildly uncommon and therefore
immensely precious. Seed pods, leaves, bark: all these
shagged and pitted surfaces, often microscopic and
unable to be seen or felt, are revealed via these
transformed shards of waste. They radiate notions of
usefulness, rehabilitation, celebration of difference.
So much of this work seems to be built from a dream
state of drawing: the doodles we do when half thinking,
half-listening, the kind where solutions swim to the
surface. They are manifest in the imagination of the built
shapes and the lush drawn embellishments: fractals,
connectors, camouflage marks, patterns-making,
biological enhancements: she is creating strange new
beasties from overlooked 'dead' materials.
Not that paper (or card) is utterly dead: its capacity to be
repurposed is remarkable. It also bears scars: a mark,
once made on its surface, cannot be removed except by
covering, disguising or repulping. If we can overcome our
obsession with perfection and newness, Gilchrist
suggests, maybe we can make do with what is already
there. Her more recent works feature hollows, which are a
more poetic form of holding than the capacity of sharpsided
containers calculated to hold precise numbers of
manufactured objects. A hollow is always ready for a few
somethings that may shift, wriggle, grow, time-share and
re-use.
Gilchrist's skill and imagination shifts us outwards and
inwards from things that we already know, things we need
to constantly revisit, and encourages us to open ourselves
to greater change – a badly needed change. Bring a child
with you, if you can, to experience the full effect of her
serious playfulness.
Dr Caren Florance is an artist, designer, writer and
creative researcher. Her practice is informed by material
bibliography and book history. She works predominantly
with text, often collaborating with artist and publishers.
By using traditional letterpress and bookbinding
processes along with more contemporary technologies,
she produces diverse works across the book arts
spectrum, from zines, artist books and installation work
to formal publishing outputs. She is collected by national
and international institutions (mostly libraries) and private
collectors. Her most recent commercial volume is Lost in
Case (Cordite Books, 2019). She is currently an Adjunct
Assistant Professor with the University of Canberra
Centre for Creative and Cultural Research (CCCR) and
lives in Yuin Country.

Image: Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Hollyhock, 2021 Photo: James McArdle

Image: Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, 2023, Burr Photo: James McArdle

Eliza-Jane Gilchrist
ARTIST STATEMENT
I work with cardboard to investigate our relationship with
nature and to question what we value.
I look at the garden, a place of familiarity, and find the
strange shapes and patterns within it. I like to discover
remnants of growth; seeds, seedpods, roots. Tiny things
that are easily overlooked. Elements of these forms I
abstract, re-combine and build at a different scale. The
resulting sculptures combine architectural references,
landscape features and plant and insect elements that
are familiar yet strange in these new configurations. These
sculptures show the wonder of the microscopic or minute
and draw attention to repetitive patterns and complex
forms.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist is a sculptor and performance maker
based in Central Victoria, on DjaDja Wurrung country. In
Eliza-Jane's sculpture practice her materials are often ugly,
worthless things, which she tries to rehabilitate through
hand-made alterations, embroidery or drawing, to
challenge perceptions about what we value.
I build these sculptures in cardboard because it is
manufactured, it is ubiquitous, not inherently beautiful and
is considered 'rubbish'. Cardboard is what we turn trees
into; it is dead organic matter. I imagine that it has a
cellular memory of being a plant and wants to reform into
these organic shapes: it remembers being a plant.
I draw on to the surface to transform the cardboard
further, lavishing detail onto the bland, flat brown. These
sculptures are memorials to plants that once were.
In its role as packaging, cardboard is symbolic of the
excessive consumption that is devastating the natural
world. By re-packaging the packaging I suggest a reappraisal
of what has value. These sculptures rehabilitate
ugliness. They invest the mundane and insignificant with
significance and beauty. The notion of packaging is
extended into the new, hollow forms I create, they
become more intricate boxes.

Image: Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, One Thing Leads Another,2019 Photo: Lorena Carrington

Image: Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Magnolia 123 & Calyculus, 2016 Photo: Lorena Carrington

Image: Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Magnolia 123 & Calyculus, 2016 Photo: Lorena Carrington

1 / Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Magnolia #1, 2015
cardboard, ink, gum strip
1680 x 170 x 170 mm
$445
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Magnolia #2, 2015
cardboard, ink, gum strip
1420 x 150 x 150 mm
$445
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Magnolia #3, 2015
cardboard, ink, gum strip
1530 x 180 x 180 mm
$445
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Calyculus (cup-shaped structure), 2016
cardboard, gum strip, ink
1560 x 510 x 310 mm
$675
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Spider Flower, 2022
cardboard, gum strip, glue, ink, cane
1830 x 1220 x 1220 mm
$2700

Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Storks Bill (Perched), 2022
Cardboard, gum strip, glue, ink
1400 x 510 x 510 mm
$590
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Currajong 2018
cardboard, gum strip, ink
890 x 540 x 1750 mm
$2700
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, One Thing Leads Another, 2019
cardboard, gum strip, ink
2000 x 1250 x 2160 mm
$5400
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Relic, 2021
cardboard, ink, gum strip
280 x 260 x 260 mm
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Hollyhock, 2021
cardboard, ink, gum strip, cane
1900 x 3800 x 3800 mm
$840

Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Burr, 2023
cardboard, ink, gum strip, varnish
340 x 260 x 170 mm
$445
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Hirsute, 2023
brown paper, cardboard, ink, gum strip
420 x 180 x 180 mm
$445
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Windborne, 2022
cardboard, ink, gum strip
370 x 400 x 440 mm
$445
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Scrobiculate, 2023
cardboard, ink, gum strip
540 x 180 x 180 mm
$445
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, The Rough Edges, 2023
cardboard, ink, gum strip, glue, paper-wrapped wire
1140 x 655 x 655 mm
$2430

Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Helianthus , 2023
cardboard, ink, gumstrip, glue
1280 x 550 x 550mm
$1900
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Follicles, 2023
cardboard, ink, gumstrip
320 x 140 x 140mm
$445
Eliza-Jane Gilchrist, Three-sided Capsule, 2023
cardboard, ink, gumstrip, glue
840 x 600 x 500mm
$1100