Beyond the front gate

As an architect in the Illawarra, I spend a lot of time thinking about what we value enough to build, and what we are quick to discard when the demo crew roll in. For decades, our built environment was defined by pure function – modest fibro shacks, weatherboard cottages with low fences built for working-class families on quarter acre blocks. Today, as our suburbs gentrify, those humble structures and their ornaments are disappearing. 

Excuse my nostalgia, but what happens when the everyday architecture we’re so eager to replace is elevated to the status of an art exhibition?

That is the provocation at the heart of Elvis Richardson’s exhibition – Edge City, at Wollongong Art Gallery. Elvis isolates the language of our suburban boundaries – gates, fences, security grilles – and strips them of their context and applies a new finish. Her pink gate piece in the exhibition Settlement #8 takes a modified steel domestic gate and finishes it in a pristine powdercoat “pink blush”.

For me, it’s difficult to look at Elvis’s work without thinking of the American artist Jeff Koons. Where Jeff took banal, everyday items like vacuum cleaners or balloon dogs and elevated them through materiality to critique conspicuous consumption, Elvis imbues the hidden agenda of the suburban front gate. By casting it in poodle-pink powder-coated steel and a filigree wrought word ‘Settlement’, she asks us to look at this object not as a simple property gateway, but as a manicured tool of land acquisition. 

Also part of the exhibition there is a small collection of works by local artist, Chris Zanko. With his painstakingly carved painted woodblocks, Chris captures Wollongong’s fading residential vernacular – the post-war fibro cottages and triple-fronted red-brick homes – often being replaced by Instagram-inspired dastardly twin dual occs. The same neat front door presentation of these houses and their ornaments are re-contextualised into multi and mono chromatic zen landscapes. 

This dialogue is rounded out by the Gallery’s coinciding exhibition, The Architecture of Feeling, curated by Megan Monte. Drawing heavily on ceramics and intimately staged objects, Megan explores how form, surface and gesture hold our memories and shape our sense of belonging. Where Elvis and Chris look at the front periphery of the home, Megan looks at the emotional architecture within it.

Art has a funny way of making the invisible built environment visible again. Definitely worth a visit. 

Edge City is at Wollongong Art Gallery until 18 October 2026