Blanche Ellis

As a multidisciplinary artist, I create my visual work in the context of poetry, movement, and music. The mediums often cross, particularly in the interplay of text and image.

Working with an emergent process, from imagination or reference, I allow my subconscious to lead me into what often feels like folkloric territory. This is informed by literature and storytelling as much as by the influence of the visual arts.

At the center of this practice is the endeavor to "play like children, seriously," at the frontier of the story worlds that reveal experiential truths that logic never comes close to.

The work is mostly figurative, and I feel as if I "meet" the figures as they emerge. Even working with models that I know, they transform into new bodies and new beings. What they bring can be a surprise or a challenge for me. I sense work is ready when I look at a figure and wonder, "What are they thinking?" and remain curious about them and their inner lives.

In this way, I explore what fascinates me: the study and experience of the human-animal relationship, particularly the uncivilized aspects of womanhood beneath the civilized veil.

Initially self-taught and focused on faces and gestures, my studio was the London Underground, where I learned to capture fleeting glimpses and develop my sense of mark-making. In recent years, I have also included traditional techniques of oil painting that bring these figures somehow closer to the surface, as if they might become flesh.

My current practice exists in building a bridge between these modes, between the primal, instinctive line and the delicate balance of color and form modeled in color, light, and dark.

I am searching for those lived moments that are ‘unfixed’, always evolving.