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About

The roots of Ellie Pratt’s work lie within the published image, centering on commonly seen tropes in fashion photography. Her focus is usually aimed at the facial expressions of models fulfilling a directed role, and the faintly unnatural postures their bodies are coerced into. Forming something of a critique of this media, Ellie swerves its more aspirational and alluring qualities, and instead seeks to illustrate a tension point between fragility and strength. We are asked to consider the functionality of the human body –the female body– as a tool ubiquitously distributed throughout visual culture, and its value as a marketable commodity.

This contrast is one of many ways that an interplay of the real and unreal is suggested on the canvas. The environments in which her subject reside are usually natural spaces, calmly imbued with natural light that appears to change with the seasons. In this respect we may look towards the back lit river scenes of Whistler’s Nocturnes, or we could imagine stepping into intimate corners of landscapes from the golden age of Dutch painters, characterised by the natural brilliance of the waking world. Through herexpressions of light Ellie subtly introduces personal reflection and a heightened sensory poignancy into the work.

Ellie’s more recent work appears to incorporate ideas from classic surrealist imagery, complexifying her intention and the symbolic layers of her work. We can see a confounding interplay between background, foreground and object, further obscuring the role of the human figure. One may suspect that Ellie’s primary artistic avenue –the published image– is dissolving into abstraction. On the contrary, it can be argued that in applying surrealist ideas of dreams, psychology and the subconscious, we’re invited to look deeper at the subject matter that has always been at hand—the behaviour of the mind as a single entity, and when engaged in interpersonal connection.