Ellie Peters

Winner — Editor’s Spotlight Award in Art

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Critter

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Chunky Critter

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The Critter

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Segmentation and Connection

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“Spawning Critters”

Caressa Layne on the work of Ellie Peters, Editor’s Choice for Rawhead Issue 3

One can easily imagine Ellie Peters “critters” crawling from the forge as their legs spark on the concrete floor and the bellows pump. Architecture and engineering are invoked, explored, and critically engaged. Also at play are elements of the human hand at work. To display the hardware of connection points, the obvious texture of the hammer and anvil, Peters deliberately leaves a human touch on the mechanically-inspired work. While utilizing representational imagery that harkens to insects and arachnids, they play with the surreal, lingering on the edge representation and abstraction.

Peters’ creations crawl not from a futuristic, artificial intelligence, but from the forges of our recent ancestors. With elongated limbs that border on delicate, gliding the eye upward past intricately forged joints, Peters’ juxtaposes these dancer-like limbs against a body so obvious in mechanical construction. Yet Peters, with a remarkable deftness, maintains unity and remarkable organic quality to these critters.

Spawning somewhere between Lovecraft, Giger, and a tinkerers workshop, these critters possess a reduction of form that destabilizes an easy narrative interpretation. While evoking a sense of the arachnid, Peters, through surrealist elongation of legs and visible mechanical parts, avoids direct representation and narrative.

And yet, because these critters are distinctly figurative and hair-raisingly strong in their effect on the viewer, they do compel a sense of storytelling somewhat indirectly. Because of their strong appeal to mood, they build narrative by invoking memory. How can one see a mechanical arachnid and not associate instinctually with experiences of curiosity, terror, and morbid fascination? Because of the sense of the abject they invoke by their surreal and mechanical figurativity, Peters’ critters do not tell a story, but build one.

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