Ella McCartney | The sound of running water is completely normal

About

Materials are brought together at different stages in a process of change: potential, ongoing and completed. The actions of ‘cutting’ and ‘supporting’ interfere with the works on display; large segments of scented soap, synthetic fabric and collected writings are all held at breaking point. 

The works make a direct reference to the body. The mass of the soap is cut away to release a scent into the room. The cutting tools are bronze casts of the inside of a fist. Each object is a recording device that documents an action; a cut, a grip, an indentation.

Ella McCartney is an artist based in London. The instability of fixed meaning in language fuels all of her work. She works with materials and processes that perform, including soap, ice, pH testing paper and photograms.  In 2017, she completed an artist residency in the Dept. Applied Linguistics and Communication, Birkbeck, University of London where the research focus was ‘translanguaging’, a process where bi-lingual speakers utilise different dialects concurrently, cutting together parts of different languages and producing new forms of communication.

Ella McCartney (b. 1985, UK). Graduated from The Royal Academy Schools in 2011 and Goldsmiths in 2008. In 2016-2017 she worked as a Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence in the Dept. Applied Linguistics and Communication at Birkbeck, University of London. Recent exhibitions include: Nomadic Vitrine, Recent Activity, Birmingham; 목, CICA Museum, South Korea; Water, Cloud CooKoo Land, London (all 2018) On Cold Spring Lane, Assembly Point, London; To Act To Know To Be (solo), Lychee One Gallery, London; Pond Skater, Five Years Gallery, London: Gender, Identity and Material (Film Screening) Royal Academy of Art, London (all 2017) Science of Imaginary Solutions, Breese Little, London; To Act To Know To Be, (performance) InDialogue, UCL Bloomsbury Festival, London and Nottingham Contemporary; Objects on the Moon, Ace Hotel, London; Felicity Black, Caustic Coastal, Manchester; Villa Romana, Florence, Italy (all 2016); Soviet Space Archive: Configuration II, Calvert 22, London; FourFold, Enclave, London; Object / Image, Motto Books, Berlin (all 2015).