We live in fragments series (2025-present) - A visual poetic video diary exploring deeper meaning behind painting and where ideas comes from. Here is one episode - Dead Living.

The Infinite Now | A solo exhibition of work by contemporary painter Ella Shepard (2022)

Here I am talking about my practice and the exhibition itself.

Fleeting by Ella Shepard and Seyda Noir (2022)

Painting and poetry in collaboration.

Scott Gutterman, suggests that a poem and a painting can fuse into something greater than each component, which is arguably; different perhaps but greater? He refers to the poet Frank O’Hara’s memorable poem, ‘Why I am not a painter’ and here you sift through the words as strokes on a canvas, beguiling and messy but intriguing, with no definable explanation. In poetry there can be confusion around ordering or meaning. Some poetry can be uncannily pertinent whilst others hazier and unclear. The poet’s eye is similar to the hand of a painter, they are both intune to their own voice, as they are making sense of the world around them. Where poetry and painting meets, there is this consciousness paired together, which I think provokes a more intense way of seeing, feeling and thinking.

Over the months of exchanging letters, I painted and Seyda wrote. We talked a lot about poetry and painting as visual letters to a past life. Seyda said: I definitely feel like a lot of my intuition is borrowed from another time, from another version of me. Of my ancestors, I'm not really sure if they were creative, but I feel that some of them were. This book is really the journey of our letters to each other and it is an exploration through layering poetry and painting, visual language and sharing poetic space.

Contemporary Cross Disciplinary Exhibition, inspired by Virginia Woolf's The Waves - Artist in residence at Leighton Park School - (2021)

Using a shared stimulus, Virginia Woolf's The Waves, I devised and curated a cross-disciplinary exhibition where students collaborated ideas and creative outcomes through Art, Music, Dance and Poetry. Spanning over different year groups, the project aimed to focus on inspiration, merging media and responsive ways of making. Over the weeks of experimentation, we listened to the book, explored the themes of consciousness, metamorphosis, fluidity and rhythm, and discussed ways in which the written language inspires decisions which cross-over the different disciplines. We asked questions like how can dance, music and art interrogate space? How can music production connect with performance? How can drawing become sculptural? The Waves is a commentary on the passing of time and its' relentless onward movement. Woolf believed that time was not a definable constant, but a fluid series of experiences, which give the impression of coherency. The book deals with the instability of the moment through fragmented language, duality of imagery and symbolism of water in movement. As the project developed the language of line, space, shape, the handling of the material and texture became important for all groups. Textured sounds and the percussion of nature, the reflective surface of metals, the sensory experience of moulding and shaping objects, where they take on their own persona. All in all, this project brought together parallels of making in all senses, it is layered in experience and forms a complete cycle of creativity, where each discipline mimics another.

Wake, Painting Installation - Oxford Brookes University (2016)

There are many different ways that water can act on the body. It is fascinating how water adds a distortion and abstraction, how it can create illusions and new textures. There is a quietness and other-worldliness to the substance of water; it is a constantly changing lens, reflecting and refracting reality. Water creates a film, a barrier between reality and the distorted dream world; the submerged female figure acting as the submerged human unconscious. The work exploits the tension between tranquillity and unease, push and pull, immersion and separation.

Visual Work Log