Exhibitions by Elliot Collins
elliot collins
windows
23 september - 17 october 2015

elliot collins
sonder
16 october - 10 november 2012

elliot collins
what i want and what i need
29 march - 21 april 2011

mary-louise browne, elliot collins, roger mortimer, aimee-rose stephenson
words walking 2 march - 1 april 2010

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 Master of Arts and Design in 2007 and has exhibited steadily since then. In 2009 he was included in the exhibition of emerging painters at Christchurch Art Gallery and in May 2010 he produced .

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.