Studio: Elliat Rich

Some years ago, I found a recollection from artist Rachel Whiteread, in which she described a lengthy process of making a piece of work resembling the safe, black, furry, childhood hiding space inside a wardrobe. She was seeking to abstract that experience through sculpture. Rachel is an artist whom you might categorize as a “seeker.” Rather than polish the same stone, seemingly making the same piece over and over in different ways, she seeks continually, through different materials, scales and contexts, to express abstract ideas, relationships and thoughts that hover – sometimes for years – just out of reach. Elliat Rich is also a seeker. While Rachel pursued the representation of a sensual, bodily experience, Elliat seeks to express and spark relations. Human to human, human to other-than-human, and, perhaps most importantly, connections between all things. For Elliat, it is the reorienting nature of the relationship stimulated by the object that is the desired outcome. She speaks of this as “designing mythology.”

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Different Thoughts (2020) uses colour and form to express interrelationships.

Image: Haydn Cattach

Elliat trained at UNSW in object design, and her career has been framed by a series of awards offering her time, space, promotion or other critical resources for practice development. These include being a finalist and people’s choice winner in the Bombay Sapphire Design Discovery Award (2008), winner of the Australian Furniture Design Award (2017) and recipient of the Northern Territory Creative Fellowship (2018). She has three arms to her practice: the first is centred around cultural questioning through objects, the second around service (responding to a brief), and the third, Elbow Workshop, is an enterprise she shares with her partner, shoemaker James B. Young. Elliat has continually resisted definition and has not settled within one area of design, developing works from the scale of a delicate glass set for brewing tea (Urban Billy, 2013) to a weighty, one-off chair, rough-hewn from sandstone (Strata Stratum Stratus, 2019).

In 2017, Elliat’s piece Place won the Australian Furniture Design Award. The prize included developing a collection with Stylecraft. Different Thoughts was launched by Stylecraft in 2020, encompassing a credenza, light and rug. Branching out from Place, Elliat also developed a collection for Sophie Gannon Gallery. Here she consciously left her linear working process behind and worked with creative intuition to create Other Places, which captured something of that which she seeks. She describes these pieces as having a kind of sentience, a quality that is impossible to design in, but is alchemic when it happens. Her current search is for a way to develop objects that reflect the “shimmer” in everything, a concept she connected with through an essay by anthropologist Deborah Rose Bird.

elliatrich.com