'Memory Card' - Ellen Norrish

Memory Card is the latest solo exhibition from West Australian figurative painter Ellen Norrish. Exploring the simultaneous pleasure and problem of excessive image accumulation, this new series of oil paintings respond to the artist's own digital hoard of travel photos, taken on a Nikon D70 camera between 2010 and 2014. Of these ~11,400 JPEGs, the exhibition features a minute sample reproduced as painted landscapes, portraits and interiors from abroad - captured at a time when DSLR cameras were the primary tool of travel photography with the practice having not yet transitioned to smartphones. Memory Card offers viewers an intriguing set of paintings of disparate subjects, small worlds that can only be connected by undisclosed personal narratives of the artist traveling in her late teens and early 20s. Exhibited together, the various subjects offer a multifaceted portrait, one view of life and its accumulated imagery.