Ella Mackenzie

Ella’s sculptural practice stems from a curiosity with material and form, explored predominantly through the making of vessels and tube-like objects, often suggestive of internal (female) body parts or organs.

Working mainly with ceramics, she creates the work by hand, to intentionally show the body’s relationship to the object through the making process. Her work aims to demonstrate how the making process itself embodies human touch, movement and experience. The resulting objects are repetitive in creation yet all are different in shape, form, weight and height.

Ella’s work draws on colour theory – particularly the psychological effects of red – due to its strong association with flesh, blood, passion and its obvious sexual connotations. She is interested in how colour can influence people’s emotions, their physical encounter with objects and their interaction with their surroundings.

Other work has challenged female objectification, interrogating the male gaze, which seeks to reduce women to mere vessels, existing only for consumption or pleasure.

As well as clay and ceramics, Ella also uses a variety of other materials such as wax, metal, concrete and screen printing in her sculptural installations. The considered positioning of forms and materials, in relationship to each other, sets up its own narrative: a kind of moving between states; an evolution of sorts.

This is done with the purpose of questioning the hierarchy of mimesis which argues that all art is a re-presentation of nature and suggests how a piece of artwork that is imitating a physical form makes it just as valuable as its counterpart.