Ellie Hannon Macleay River Mural

In this mural, Ellie's explores the Macleay River and its diverse native plants and trees. She presents this space through the lens of place and memory, and how we shape our experiences of places. Ellie is intrigued by the way that darkness can alter the experience of our surroundings and shift the way our inner and outer worlds meet. As the sun sets, the fading light shapes and reshapes a tree, a movement, a sound, or a shadow down a pathway. The ensuing darkness bends our perception and imagination, testing our trust in what we see with our own eyes. All that is solid dissolves with the light and becomes something new. These are the moments in which we slow down to notice the wax and wane and remember that everything in this world is cyclical and transient. Nothing remains still. Ellie Hannon is an Australian artist based in Newcastle NSW that works across exhibitions, public art, and community engagement projects. She explores the natural environment as both a subject and a point of departure that begins an investigation into how interactions and impacts on these spaces shape individual and collective identity. Characterised by her bold and harmonic colourscapes, Hannon’s paintings employ gestural mark-making with playful textures and perspectives formed through patch-worked backgrounds, gravitational mid-grounds, and intricate foregrounds.