When Ellie Kaufmann looks out her window she sees “ the theatre of life.”
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The Newcastle artists creates work which reflects on the everyday and the her “own backyard”.
“I like to portray people I know, people who influence me. People who like being themselves,” Kaufmann said.
“I don’t take it too seriously. I do want people to have a bit of fun with it.”
The works are a glorification, or a tribute, to life in suburbia.
“It’s just my life, it’s bright and features all the people who surround me,” Kaufmann said.
“I want to keep it honest. I want it to be the things around me and the people I meet. It’s my time here.
“I probably have a different outlook to many people, and I make the kind of art I want to see.”
Kaufmann sometimes find the subject matter for the works while cruising the streets in a car.
“I will see something and maybe stop and get out and take a photo,” she said.
“It could just be a colour or a shape of a house, or something quirky like a mailbox or the venetians.
“I want to portray a narrative as well, like a bid of a bad girl situation.”
“I look to my surroundings, I don’t want to make things up. There is a coolness about it, about the everyday and ordinary and probably boring to a lot of people.
“But if you look at things in a certain light … things kind of pop out.
She cites one of her influences as fellow Novocastrian artist Peter Lankas,
“I always admired how he took in his surroundings,”
Kaufman is one of five artists who will exhibit in Rock’n the Suburbs a group show with Nadia Aurisch, Peter Lankas, Jo Shand and Dane Tobias.
It opens at 139 Beaumont Street, on November 9.
Partners in art
Lottie Consalvo and James Drinkwater are firmly establishing themselves on the national arts stage through their respective practices. Both artists live and work in Newcastle.
Relics in Alters will be the first major combined exhibition of this dynamic creative duo with the artists presenting works developed both individually and in collaboration.
Influenced by the structures often used in shrines and in places of ceremony or worship, Relics in Alters looks at ideas around transition and reverence.
Drinkwater is primarily a painter working in abstraction and assemblage.
Consalvo is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, performance, video and photography.
Relics in Alters opens at the Lock Up on December 9.
The Lock Up is at 90 Hunter Street, Newcastle.
