Page 33 - Fiji Traveller 2024 Issue 6

By Samantha Magick

In an age where art is increasingly digitally-manipulated, there is no mistaking the
artist’s hand in the work of Su Elliott.
Elliott likes to leave the faint traces of her erasures and evidence of her brush strokes
in her finished works.
“To me it is important for whoever's looking at the work to track my thought processes,
[to know] ‘she made this, she erased this and she shifted it here’. Often you see a painting
and it's so picture-perfect, but it might as well been taken by a camera. I want all the
mistakes to be in there. Because at the end of the day, life's not perfect, right? It's not
perfect.”
Elliott has always been interested in art, but says growing up in Fiji in the 1960s, there
was very little opportunity to learn. Later, as a young mother living in New Zealand, she
took up watercolours, and then while living in the Philippines during the tumultuous post-
Marcos period, studied Chinese brush painting techniques.
Returning to New Zealand, Elliott attained formal academic qualifications in art and
printmaking. Elliot also graduated with a Postgraduate Diploma in Museum Studies from
Massey University before spending about 14 years working as a librarian.
But she knew that she needed to pursue her art, so in 2016, Elliott resigned from her
job and prepared to return home to Fiji.
She observes that while first and second generation Polynesian artists growing up
in Australia and New Zealand often mine from their cultural knowledge, “I was slightly
different. The sort of mining I was doing there, the sort of art that I was creating, woodcuts
and etchings and works on paper, they were always memories, memories of childhood
stories that mum used to tell me, fairy tales that I grew up with, folk tales, and all these
things made their way into these pages .
“But I realised that a large chunk was missing and that in order for me to go forward,
I had to come back to the source. It was a huge decision for me to come back, I didn't
know how it was going to pan out. But I just had to come because I recognised this is
the source.”
She continues: “In January 2017 I boarded the flight, I arrived here. I sold everything. I
packed just some books and all my art supplies, and I came. I left everything behind and
came with four suitcases.”
Oceania Centre Director, Larry Thomas, acknowledged the bravery this took while
opening a recent exhibition of Elliott’s work. “She sacrificed family. She sacrificed work.
And she sacrificed a certain way of life in pursuit of her art.”
Elliott took her time easing back into Fiji, spending time with her ailing mother and wider
family, before returning to art. Her most recent body of work was created during Covid,
and is a vibrant array of deeply introspective interior scenes and self-portraits, plus some
large-scale charcoal portraits.
Elliott recalls: “I was left with myself, and began to think, 'Alright, so you are here now.
You've got this skill, what are you going to do with it?' And it was the best time to just
focus on art making.”

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