School of Fine Art Sculpture & Environmental Art
Ellie Callender
Ellie’s work centres around exploring the contrast between working class life and art school life. She shows the differences between the cultures of these two groups of people, highlighting the disparities they have with each other. Ellie’s research mainly focuses on the art education system and the lack of it in working class communities and why the art world is set up to exclude the working-class people. She has researched the traditional trade jobs of the working class i.e. sign painters/banner makers, as they are seen as the intersection of working-class jobs and the art world.
Ellie works with many different media; painting, typography, sculptural (casting). She takes objects and remakes them in different scales, with different materials, changing the aesthetic of it.
Her final pieces are sculptural and could be installed back into the working-class areas or taken out of that context and placed in a white cube space, helping to highlight the contrast she explores. Ellies firsthand experience growing up and working in the working-class environment and then coming to art school herself helps inform her work and highlights the disparities on a personal level for her.
Works
The Local
My degree Show final piece began With the idea the feeling of an old mans Pub, warm, cluttered, worn and filled With Stories. I was drawn to these spaces firstly because of my own history with them, grown up in an old man’s pub but also because of their deep connection to working class identity, social interaction and collective memory.
Through collecting found objects like brassware, old frames and worn Furniture I was able to build a space that felt layered. Weathering the Walls and arranging the old objects allowed me to transform the space from Sterile and institutional to something more human, a space that felt real, lived in and emotionally familiar.
Overall, this Piece is about Place, class and community. I feel as though it’s a quiet resistance to the idea of what should be presented in gallery spaces and what stories should be told. I’m Proud of how it came together and I feel as though I stayed true to the places and People which inspired it.
