Elisabeth Pointon

INFO

Name	Elisabeth Pointon (she/her)
Born	1992
Country of Birth	Aotearoa
Place of Residence	Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Ethnicities	Indo-Fijian, Pākehā
Dealer Gallery	Jhana Millers Gallery
Artform	Visual arts
Decades Active	2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Elisabeth Pointon is a multimedia visual artist of Indo-Fijian and Pākehā descent whose practice questions institutional structures and power with a playful brazenness, exploring “the idea of institutionalising inclusion with a focus on working parents, communities of colour, the LGBTQ community and women.”

Early in her career, while working at a luxury car dealership, Pointon made a series of works that addressed commonalities within corporate workplaces, such as pleasantries and bigoted slights. This included taking the formulaic language used in internal emails and enlarging particular statements like “GET IT RIGHT.” — a phrase Pointon had observed not only as an employee at the dealership but in correspondence between curators and artists during exhibition planning.

From there, Pointon started increasing the size of her artworks and expanding her approach to wordplay, creating several inflatable pieces like a ball pit, a zeppelin, a large full stop, and even a plane. Each of these works features a word or phrase. Some are words of positivity like “Spectacular.” or “Special.”, but oftentimes the artist uses double-entendre to expand the reading of these artworks. Pointon also pays attention to the power of punctuation — the full stop has become a recurring feature of her work, as another reference to the internal emails at the car dealership. She explains that the full stop at the end questions the sincerity of a positive enthusiastic statement in these corporate contexts. As Pointon has stated, “I found this generic affirmation to be issued out of obligation, devoid of actual feeling by the primarily white male supervisors and managers.”

In the exhibition THERE IS AN ARTWORK IN ALL OF THIS. presented by Jhana Millers Gallery and designer handbag brand Yu Mei, Pointon put the title of the exhibition onto a lightbox. This seemingly simple act prompts the viewer to question whether the lightbox is, in fact, an artwork — or if the artwork is inside the hollow lightbox, or if the true artwork is found elsewhere in the exhibition. This playfulness with language and interrogation of value are common themes throughout Pointon’s practice, which crosses several mediums, all with a level of cheekiness.

In 2021, Pointon was commissioned to create an installation and video work for the Aotearoa Art Fair with support from Tiffany and Co. Responding to the luxury jewellery brand’s recent campaigns to diversify the couples they included in their advertising, Pointon inserted a large inflatable with the phrase ‘WHOEVER.’ into the store’s Britomart location. Being asked to return to the Aotearoa Art Fair the following year, Pointon created THE EXCEPTIONAL DROP. — designer water, presented in a glass bottle, and distributed throughout the events at the fair.

When discussing the humour that permeates her work, Pointon regularly paraphrases a quote from the book Indian Ink by Jacob Rajan and Justin Lewis, where they say, “Laughter is a Trojan horse.” Her use of humour is often used to introduce criticism of institutional structures, like that of her workplaces, or the assumed masculine gender that is given to her aesthetically minimal text work.

Pointon was born in the Hutt Valley. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts through Massey University in 2014 and went on to complete her Master of Fine Arts at the same university in 2016. As of 2023, Pointon is a tutor at the University of Auckland in the Faculty of Creative Arts and Industries and the Gallery Manager at Tautai. She is represented by Jhana Millers Gallery in Pōneke.