The Artist Currently Known As: Ella Thompson
Ella is a visual artist specialising in ceramics, digital works, multimedia and fibre art (a bit of everything!) at SCA.
What are you studying? I’m studying a Bachelor of Visual Arts and hopefully I’m going to do honours next year.
Were you doing science for a little while? I did two biology electives this year.
How are you finding it? Last semester I was making a lot of art about biology, and I just thought, okay, let me do an elective that’s going to help me learn more. That was probably my favourite subject I’ve ever done; this semester, it’s really hard. The art degree is really good. I would start again and do the whole thing again if I could.
Could you tell me what you like to make? At the moment a lot of ceramics. In general I like to make things that are sculptural, I like image-based work, digital collage. I like trying to make things that you kind of know what you’re looking at, but you also don’t.
What are you consuming at the moment? Reading, watching, listening to, thinking about? I’m watching this show called Offspring. It’s a midwife show. The way I consume media, I get really obsessive. Slushynoobz on Youtube. I really like the podcast. I was reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson for a while. And lots of music: I’ve gotten really into Rooster. Lots of Bladee, Addison Rae, Malcolm Todd.
You have your grad show coming up. What are you making for it?
It’s going to be two really big prints, portrait, on matte paper, about A0. They’re both overlaid, lower-opacity images. One of them is a landscape image that I smooshed to be portrait, a photo of this oval near my gran’s house when I was visiting her in Orange. Over the top are these hands that are really zoomed in, and you kind of can’t tell that they’re hands. The other one is a photo of a river under a bridge, also in Orange, smooshed to be portrait, and over the top of that is this ceramic wax sculpture thing I made.
In front of that, this massive cobblestone block around the same size as the prints. It’s foam covered in wax and dark grey eyeshadow and mica powder. I want it to be like: how did this appear? Made by someone, but also looking like it could’ve spawned.
It can be really stressful to make art on demand. Do you find that pressure helpful or not? A mix of both. I think overall yes, despite the doubts that I have. I’m such an overthinker about what I make but overall, it helps me produce more, and at the moment with ceramics, I’m trying to be grateful that I can access the facilities. I need to make everything I can think of right now! Once I’m out of it, I think I’ll be really proud of what I’ve made.
Your work for me is so sensorial; things that you look at and go, my body sort of knows what this is, but my brain doesn’t. Do you find yourself drawn to texture and specific colours? I’m most touched by work that obfuscates things. Crevices are really important to me—pockets, dimples, squished things that you can’t tell what’s under there. There’s a lot of ways to achieve that sort of feeling of… you don’t know what’s under it, inside it, through it. It’s kind of like portals. It’s a reflection of me feeling, I don’t know what this world is. How can I show that through creating my own thing that other people don’t know about? That gives me a sense of agency. I can make something that I know and understand, and maybe other people don’t, and that’s okay.
Sometimes you see art that you don’t understand, and you think, I’m stupid because I don’t understand this. The period that we’re in right now, in terms of the internet and young people and making art, is very ironic. What you’re making [I think] is coming out of irony and into sincere questions. What are you thinking of when you say irony? Like, commentary works? Do you mean humour? Maybe not even the word irony, just art that is very self-conscious. Do you mean camp? No, because I think camp is quite sincere. If it’s actually camp. Which is subjective.
Do you have anything you think is very camp? I don’t know, being yourself! Not trying to be cool.
I think what I mean by irony—maybe this is very specific to me, my definition—is part of the whole, trying self-consciously to be cool. There’s so much pressure to go, I’m making something that’s not up for interpretation. I’m making a work about this thing.
I’ve definitely been guilty of that. Sometimes I’ll sit down and go, I’m going to write THE poem. And it’s going to say everything I think about the world— and if I don’t it’s not worth making. Yes. And then I write it, and it’s total shit.
What you were saying before, about irony, I think my work comes from letting it be tacky when it needs to be. Tacky and kind of literal. Sometimes it is just, I put that there because I think it looks cool. I get told by teachers, your work is just about aesthetics. But I’m interested in the way things look because this is a visual artwork!
If you can’t exactly say why you did something, I think that usually means it’s good. If you’re not as sure about your work, I think you’re being pushed outside of yourself. Maybe you’ll look back on it and understand. Just trusting yourself and your intuition, even if your mind doesn’t catch up with that.
It’s something so personal. Where do our tastes come from? Fashion sense or music taste? Art is just another form of expression. No-one’s going around saying, well, why do you like that song though? Explain to me in 200 words. I feel like a lot of people make art to make sense of the world around them, but if you’re being honest with yourself, you never will understand everything; why you feel that way, why that happened. It can help you cope and build up a tolerance to things you don’t understand—like change—but I don’t think it’s meant to be this fixed thing that has all the answers. I don’t think that’s genuine.
You can find Ella at @ellaa.kate and @ella.16822.