Ella Markell

Statement

My practice is primarily focused on exploring the communication of sensation through the materiality of oil paint. For me, painting is a language of sensation rather than of facts, it allows for intuition and feeling to be expressed in a world obsessed with rationality and mechanistic thought, an ontology which threatens to disenchant our perception of the world, especially nature. I approach this in my practice through investigating the poetics and sensory memory of space and how our identities and environments are inextricable. I approach this largely through form; washed and weathered layers, reduction of paint, tactile marks, a process which visibly entangles material with time, expressing that time as well as subject, is inextricable from space. ​

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My approach to content is intuitive. The subject exists as a facilitator to sensation, which is enhanced through keeping the narratives of my work open.  I often choose to paint familiar scenes, symbols of superstition and the agency of nature. A practice which submits one to unexplainable natural or cosmic powers, and which keeps us in communication with the spaces we occupy, in a constant state of noticing and unknowing. My practice aims to invite an enchanted perception of the world where inner and outer worlds merge. We are emotionally, psychologically and physically entangled with the spaces we occupy. I approach this in my practice by playing with the essence of light, depth of field, colour fields in empty spaces, variation in mark making and abstraction through leaving out information.​

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Whether that is a lone figure in a bath or in the hills, or figure as part of a still life at a windowsill, the foundation exploration of space remains the same, dissolving the boundaries of one's identity into the surrounding lively material of the world. My practice aims to uncover and express how place and material are imbued with senses and associations, as well as the way the psychological is imbued with place - they become inseparable from one another.