Elliot Collins wins Molly Morpeth Canaday Contemporary Art Award

Elliot Collins has been one of Aotearoa New Zealand's leading contemporary artists for well over a decade. With works held in many leading institutional gallery collections, including Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, his recent win of the Molly Morpeth Canaday contemporary art award for his work 'Did you get the watercress I left you?' is incredibly well deserved.

For any artist, receiving recognition through winning awards marks a special and significant moment. For Collins, the win is significant not only for winnings sake. 'Did you get the watercress I left you' represents the coalescence and articulation of a number of threads that have been running through individual works over the past few years. Poetry in abstraction, geometric abstraction, the use of found, and natural materials - such as the wooden egg and of course, the shopping trolly.

'Did you get the watercress I left you is quintessential Collins. Deeply thoughtful, infused with pathos, and exceptionally clever conceptually and formally.

When Artfull asked Collins to share his insights on his award winning work, Collins said:

It's a response to the disconnect I'm feeling between the art world and small-town life. It's a minimalist sculpture/painting in an homage to Anne Truitt, meets poetry and community. Visually, the small shopping bag on wheels recalls old ladies at the Otara markets or the local shops. [There is ] something about the economy of scale, the smallness or limits of the life of the elderly meeting high-level abstraction.

This work is part of a larger body of constructed painting which follows on from the solo show 'The Weight of Words' I did at the Keepers Cottage in Tāmaki Mataura in 2022. That show was, in retrospect was a really big deal. I wanted to build on the threads of sterility of minimalism, or even contemporary art made humble, more readable, for regular people, that came together in 'The Weight of Words'. 'Did you get the watercress I left you' is about humility and the beauty of the everyday, much like the works in that 2022 show were. It also speaks to our longing for connection.

Additionally, it's inspired by a real local person I see every day. This old Māori lady is real. She's not a recollection, or amalgamation of people. She's still walking on the beach every evening, even on stormy days.

The eggs sitting on the stack of wooden blocks are also there to highlight the fragility of everything. You'd never carry eggs like that. They are kind of absurd objects. One also has puketea burned into the surface by the original maker, a little note to a past life that the trolly might have had.

It's also about travel and movement. Not rapid, fast paced city speed, but a more gentle, natural human pace. The shopping bag on wheels never reaches a pace beyond an elderly stroll.

Ultimately, the work is visual poetry, personification and more than a little bit nostalgic. I deliberately wanted it to be really "uncool", just to avoid any kind of social media or trending content."

At the awards ceremony, Andrew Clifford had the following to say of Collin's piece:

"At its most basic, this work could be described in abstract terms for its careful balance of shapes, scale, contrast and fields of colour. However, this painting, if we can still consider it in those terms, has been deconstructed into separate panels and parts to bring in sculptural qualities of stacking, layering and gravity. The careful placement and balance of the elements creates tension, especially the placement of two coloured eggs, one large, wooden and inscribed, the other small and brightly coloured. That’s where things start to get more literal.

Assuming you haven’t already noticed that this painting’s framing device, the structure that holds it all together, is an old shopping trolley bag. The kind favoured by more senior members of our community. It holds it all together but also holds it in suspension – it wants to walk away and disturb the fine balance of the elements. Who is the owner and where are they? The use of colour, as the work’s description reminds us, has external associations and connects us with the landscape and its occupants, as well as with elements of space and time. Through these narrative possibilities this work evokes stories, memories and time, and encourages us to consider poetic relationships with the spaces we occupy and how we share them."

What we love most about Collin's work — this award winning piece, and the artists' entire body of work — is the way he conveys so much depth of meaning in such simple ways. Whether you agree with Collins and consider it to be 'really uncool visual poetry' or like Clifford, see the narrative possibilities, there is no denying that the work give you pause. Pause to think about what and how it makes you feel. Which is of course always the point for Collins: To slow the pace of life; hold fast to moments and memories; to stop time, if only for a few fleeting moments.