Sydney Exhibition

Ella Harris

Opening Event . Wednesday 29 May, 6 – 8pm
Runs . 30 May – 9 June, 2024

Introducing recent graduate Ella Harris, who completed her studies in 2023 at the National Art School, Sydney. A multidisciplinary artist working in Darug Country, her practice concerns the quasi-reality that arises when we, by psychological necessity, narrativise and mythologise our experiences on both a micro and macro scale. Employing ethereal aesthetics and subjects of otherworldly delicacy, Ella explores nebulous and fragile frameworks of meaning.

Ella’s recent works delve into her own tentative relationship with joy and its counterpart, guilt. Expanding her research into secular art history, Ella is drawn to the thematic absence of joy in symbolic visual languages, dominated instead by references to struggle and melancholy.

A series of representational genre paintings playfully subvert folk omens of doom – for example, the black raven, transformed into a glowing, iridescent crow – in an exploration of the sense of foreboding that contentment can induce. Personal and painterly sketches punctuate this body of work, meditating on the guilt-ridden reprieve and spiritual confusion of good fortune amidst global suffering.

Immensely relatable in this moment, Ella investigates a cultural conception of general happiness as unmoored, insensitive or frivolous; both the artist and her audience are left unsure on how to navigate joy meaningfully. Complementary works in both representational and abstract styles mirror the oscillation between clarity and confusion in a daily attempt to process experiences of delight while grappling with the realities of global chaos and decay.

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