Ella Shepard

Ella Shepard (b. 1993 Harrogate) studied Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University and has received an MA in Painting from Arts University Bournemouth. Shepard has exhibited with Modern Art Oxford, The Arts Council & residencies have taken her to Bauhaus University & Cove Park. Her work has been purchased for private collections and her paintings can be viewed as a part of Oxford’s Public Art Collection. Awards include Bath Art Prize, Lena Fritsch’s Award (The Ashmolean), and Jackson’s Painting Prize Longlist. Her painting was selected by Tracey Emin for the Margate Art Prize shortlist.

Ella Shepard is a painter, drawing on personal and collective memories to create works that deeply connect with time, flux and the instability of a moment. Like reality, the paintings are fractal, they exist on multiple planes. Allowing for figures to emerge from veiled layers of oil paint, the characters seemingly exist in a state of flux between themselves and their dream-like environments. The process of layering marks and building recollections reaches a point of abstraction, where the scenes are confused and distorted, as Shepard believes that life is experienced like that of a collage. She describes the process of painting as trying to remember; it is a search for clarity and the concurrent negation of that clarity; Like recalling a fragmented dream which is collapsing in on itself. In an internal world they are teetering on the edge of dissolve. They are fragile, fleeting and temporary.