Inside the Studio // Paul Uhlmann on Stuart Elliott's F-Tales

Currently on show at Art Collective is a new body of work entitled F-Tales by Stuart Elliott, one of Western Australia’s most venerable, prolific and original artists. Glancing over his oeuvre of the past 40 years one sees a strong ever-evolving arch of concerns, which through subversive humour, observation and imagination takes a hard look at the true cost of a society based on extraction and industrialisation.

The show consists of a series of complex installations with sculptural forms paired, combined and contrasted with miniature paintings. The forms appear to be industrial objects and factories which have fallen into disuse and are pock marked by the forces of weathering, the harshness of a dry and relentless climate and the insistent hammerings of corrosive time. Scale is key to the success and reading of these works. One falls into the worlds that Stuart Elliott’s imagination has so carefully developed, so that it is as if our own sense of scale shrinks down to Lilliputian proportions; we walk amongst ruins and ponder the impact that our consumerist lifestyle has on ourselves, our environment and ecosystem. There is an intricate amount of detail at work which immediately fascinates. It is worthwhile contemplating some of the key elements that enable the work to operate at a high level as I will briefly do here. Key to the success of these works is the quality of deception, the importance of myth and storytelling, and a lifelong devotion to the awareness of play as a method for developing and communicating knowledge.

Each work is a carefully developed schema of ideas and retelling of myths and stories. The artist in conversation, revealed that his process involves a great deal of drawing, the jotting down of the story and then the organic development of the making, the tinkering and carving of forms. As the work organically develops, he sketches more and more so that these storied works represent a pushing and pulling of tensions within the physics of what can be made and the internal process of realising a narrative that is almost out of reach, but somehow part of his consciousness. In this body of work, the true nature of humanity is examined through the genre of fairy tales which are adapted and invented. Before Disneyland cleaned up fairy tales, the early original stories collected by the German brothers Grimm revealed gothic horror tales designed as moral works to ensure children were scared just enough not to venture alone in forests or to take advice from strangers. Stuart’s tales are much more cryptic, personal and absurdist, however there is a subversive humour at work here which takes aim at institutions and weasel words.

Part of his success lies within his approach to deception. Artists have traded in deception as cultural magicians for thousands of years and there is the legendary account of the 5^th century BCE Greek painter Zeuxis who painted a still life with such realistic grapes that birds flew down from the sky to peck at the fruit. For Stuart, deception is not just maintained by an exacting consistent scale but in the trickery of his craft. For example, the frames appear to be cast iron and many objects within the show appear to be heavy cast iron objects from the Victorian era, however the artist revealed to me in conversation that these are carefully carved works – everything is wood in this convincing illusion.

I’m also reminded of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, where a young son walks on a forever journey with his father through a destroyed dystopian landscape. The failure of a system is everywhere encountered, and the figures are reduced to the need for survival. The book serves as a warning to us all to reconsider how we live our lives. With Stuart Elliott’s work, it feels like this period could be in the distant future, or perhaps this reality is closer to home in the here and now. Many of the curious, for example, would have stumbled on discarded buildings, such as the Art Deco South Fremantle Power Station which stares out to sea. This glorious crumbling ruin is covered in graffiti, surrounded by fences and is a monument to past glories. A casual encounter will set the mind racing and thinking about daily routines of long-ago workers from the not-so-distant past.

Play, where one learns by doing, is recognised by many educational theorists, such as Jean Piaget (1896-1980) as being essential to cognitive development. Indeed, play is so much part of our psychology, that the cultural Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) in his 1938 book argued that rather than describing humanity as Homo sapiens that we might better understand ourselves as Homo ludens – with the Latin ludens roughly translating as “one who plays”. Through Huizinga’s lens, play, which might be mistaken as being irrational time wasting, is in fact a fundamental driving life-force which enables human culture to flourish across culture, art, law, philosophy and more. For Stuart, play not only allows the work to organically take shape, so that he and later his audience are surprised as to where the work develops, it is also primarily the focused activity where he finds and evolves meaning.

Stuart Elliott, who for over four decades has made a significant contribution to art in Australia, has made yet another expansive show which details his exceptional approach to making and thinking. It is a world of generosity, entwined with humour, biting satire, and vivid imagination.

Paul Uhlmann, July 2026

Huizinga, J. (1950). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Boston Press. https://merton.bellarmine.edu/files/original/b0899cfad820ab8ad7033952b7a022ba1d7cab9d.pdf

McCarthy, C. (2011). The road. Picador.

Puscher, B. (2024, April 7). Understanding the Brothers Grimm beyond princesses and magic. AS Magazine. https://www.colorado.edu/asmagazine/2024/04/07/understanding-brothers-grimm-beyond-princesses-and-magic

Zipes, J. (2015). How the Grimm Brothers saved the fairy tale. Humanities, 36(2). https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/marchapril/feature/how-the-grimm-brothers-saved-the-fairy-tale