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Tom Ellis's work is concerned with physical structures and their representation, with the conventions, parameters and mechanisms of encountering and perceiving the world about us. Employing and manipulating mundane, overly familiar objects, Ellis aims to make apparent the very act of looking itself, paradoxically achieving this through a carefully structured staging involving optical illusion and the stark physical presentation of the actual object he has chosen to represent.
In
"Stack" a number of plastic garden chairs were arranged
in a series of unequal stacks which were supported upside down
on specially constructed wooden stands. The arrangement was such
that the inverted feet of each stack were aligned at precisely
the same height. By this inversion the stacks transformed into
an optical, rather than physical event, an image captured, upside
down, on the viewer's retina
In "Photograph" Ellis presented a glazed, ceramic bowl
over painted with the design of the rustic, tourist bowl on which
the piece is based. By doing this Ellis retains many of the qualities
that photography records par excellence, such as the
way the glaze catches the light, the precise texture of the hand
painted design and the overall attention to detail that is the
natural preserve of the camera. The piece creates an inversion
of the photograph's status as image of the material world
by proposing the possibility of the material world as image
of the photograph.
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