• Ellie Walker’s practice explores the dynamic interplay between control and release, evolving through a sustained engagement with materiality. 

    Uncertainty, failure and risk sit at the core of Walker's process and are not only embraced but actively exploited. By cultivating these conditions in both the studio and the work itself, Walker invites disruption to habitual ways of working, destabilising her own authority in the process.

     

    The medium begins to assert its own agency, generating unexpected outcomes and problems within the work. What follows is a negotiation between intention and emergence - a tension between what the artist seeks and what the work insists on becoming.

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    Walker often begins by translating her inner world onto the canvas through loose washes of colour, sometimes working from a study and at other times improvising. These initial layers develop into expressive, gestural marks that emerge through impulsive and spontaneous responses to what unfolds on the surface.

     

    Working on unstretched canvas, stapled to the wall or laid directly on the floor, Walker approaches painting as if it were drawing. This removes a sense of preciousness, allowing for freedom and immediacy. The canvas is frequently rotated, disrupting orientation and expectation. At times, she tears apart both new and unresolved paintings, stitching and reassembling fragments so that different temporal moments coexist within the same work.

     

    The act of making is fast, physical and demanding, yet it also requires stillness - moments of simply being with the work, looking and engaging in the problem-solving inherent to the process. This allows her to remain responsive to what the surface asks for, rather than imposing a predetermined outcome.

     

    The resulting paintings become archives of both personal and material histories, holding traces of time, experience and emotion through cycles of collapse and renewal. Through processes of destruction and re-emergence, Walker’s works unfold as layered emotional landscapes.

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