Ella Williams is an Edinburgh-based painter and recent Edinburgh College of Art graduate. Her work approaches how transitory experiences can be documented materially through paint, narrativising fleeting observations through visual storytelling practices.
Her large-scale works operate as imperfect translations of non-linear periods of time. Each composition is drawn from an experiential archive of images, gathered through observation. These visual partialities become anchors into intangible, expansive swathes of remembered time, disparate images through which the viewer can implicate a whole in a collaborative act of fictioning.
Influenced by a breadth of narrative contexts - from the compositionally rich symbolism of medieval panel painting to modernist literature, traditions of visual communication are incorporated - linearity, repetition and symbolism. Conceptions of the past are mythologised through re-arrangements of visual ‘anchors’, motifs born of the routine and symbolic, the unravelling of an apple, the familiar pattern of worn tile.
These resulting works are imagined as liminal, and latently inaccessible environments. Varying planes of perspective and scale complicate the surreal from the banal, establishing the inaccessibility of remembered space; a domestic scene is disrupted by the weave of a fish.
Ella is a recipient of an RSA John Kinross Scholarship and is an RBA Rising Stars exhibitor.
