Ellen Macdonald (b.1983, Stirling) lives and works in Edinburgh. Working primarily from observation, her practice explores painting as both a means of representation and a record of its own making. She is interested in the relationships between objects, actions and images, and in the ways that painting mediates between them. Her works function simultaneously as images and documents: they depict the visible world while bearing witness to the actions that brought them into being. Moving between observation and invention, abstraction and illusion, objectivity and subjectivity, her work occupies a threshold where images remain open, unstable and in the process of becoming.
Since graduating from the Glasgow School of Art in 2007 and from the Royal Academy Schools in 2014 she has taken part in exhibitions in the UK and abroad including: Painted Conversations (with Esther Thornily Walker), Whitespace Gallery, Edinburgh, 2024; Dear All, Kingsgate Project Space, London, 2023 and a two-person show U include the, wall between and you with Alex Clarke at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, 2015. In 2026 she recieved the Visual Artists and Craft Makers Awards from Creative Scotland and in 2025 she undertook a residency at RSA Collections as part of the RSA Residencies for Scotland Programme.
Receiving the RSA Landscape Award in 2007, the year I graduated from GSA, was a significant milestone in the early development of my practice. While the financial support was invaluable, the award also provided something less tangible but equally important: a sense of confidence and validation at a pivotal moment, as I made the transition from art school into sustaining an independent artistic practice.
In 2025, I received further support from the RSA through a residency at the RSA Collections department as part of the Residencies for Scotland programme. Working with the archives of the first three women to be awarded the title of HRSA, I developed a new body of work that has been particularly meaningful following my recent return to Scotland.
