Artist Story
Born in Harrogate, Yorkshire Ella recently completed a two year residency at Leighton Park in Berkshire. Ella exhibits across the country particularly Oxfordshire, Bath, London as well as further a field in Europe. Originally working in the world of theatre, Ella has experience in set design and scenic art and she assisted OBE awarded set designer Es Devlin. As part of her art school training Ella spent a Semester studying painting at Bauhaus University in Weimar, home to the likes of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Since graduating she has taken part in residencies and undertaken commissions, notably her painting 'Ignite' has been used for Young Romance's most recent album cover 'Don't Look'. In 2017 Ella worked alongside BiC pens and created pieces in collaboration with Parkinson's UK, where all proceeds went to aid the work of the charity. In 2018 she won the Young Bath Art Prize and went on to be awarded her first solo show. She has undertaken training in the sight-size method at the London Atelier of Representational Art (LARA), to create realistic drawings and paintings with great accuracy. Ella's work can be viewed as a permanent part of Oxford’s Public Art Collection. More recently Ella was commissioned by Modern Art Oxford and the Arts Council to make work in conjunction with the pandemic and in recent exhibitions she has worked with Zuleika Gallery ,King House Gallery, The Ashmolean Museum and Arthelix on Artsy.
'I'm interested in the concept of reality and how it is perceived and filtered and how it is in a constant state of flux. Fleeting moments and thoughts are mirrored, reflected and refracted through our subconscious thought and the passage of time creates new realities distanced from the original. I choose to blur the line between abstraction and realism by layering distorted memories and unconscious abstraction, where I am using texture of paint to sculpt the fluid elasticity of time. I am often drawn to using reflective filters; water, glass and mirrors as a separation or a threshold between our inner and outer realities. The atmosphere in my subject matter is presented in a dream or limbo-like state and its’ interrupted narrative is used to express the constantly changing lens of the human condition.’