In The Garden: Subterráneo

“Beneath the airy, ornamental aspect of a garden is the close, unconscious twist of root and rock, where the animal and the invisible lie, and from which instinct irrepressibly arises.“

See full catalogue of works here

In The Garden: Subterráneo

This substantial and still expanding body of mixed-media work on paper, board and canvas, draws the visitor down the garden path into a strange and beautiful world, populated by dark, folkloric scenes and creatures.

Amongst these works are several series such as Mythologies and Feral Mothers, that explore human-animal nature and the uncivilised aspects of womanhood beneath the civilised veil. 

As a multidisciplinary artist, Blanche Ellis creates her visual work in the context of poetry, movement and music. Moving freely between mediums and surfaces, between figurative and abstract, she interweaves drawing, painting, collage and fragments of text from her own poems, thoughts or daily notes, handwritten or typed on an old typewriter. This playfulness of materials generates a tactile presence and invites the viewer into the artist’s creative process, one of dreamlike association and vividness in which the artist endeavours to “play like children: seriously”.

In this exhibition, the imagery, emerging from both observation and imagination, is encountered as a garden, an organic space of endless growth and decay that come hand in hand and are often indistinguishable from one another. Beneath the airy, ornamental aspect of a garden is the close, unconscious twist of root and rock in subterranean space, where the animal and the invisible lie, and from which instinct irrepressibly arises. Blanche uses her work to travel between these layers of dark and light, conscious and subconscious, between the human, the animal and the plant-life that interweaves all other elements.

It is part realism and part dreamscape, drawing inspiration from the literary genre of magical realism, from folk tales and from the invisible, inward movement of experience that knows no form unless we invent it.

Artist Bio

Blanche Ellis born in London, 1988, now works from her Barcelona studio in Spain. Studies at The Royal Drawing School (London) and Barcelona Academy of Art (Barcelona) have combined with years of autodidactic practice across multiple mediums and art forms. Her work has been shown in galleries in the UK, Europe and the United States.

—

This first, big, solo exhibition by English artist Blanche Ellis, In The Garden: Subterráneo, was first shown in Barcelona, el Raval, in Atelier Güell in September 2022.