Ellie MacGarry was born in Cambridge, UK in 1991. She completed a BA in Fine Art at the University of Leeds in 2014 and most recently gained her MFA in painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, as a recipient of the Felix Slade scholarship.
She has exhibited widely across the UK and has taken part in artist’s residencies in Leeds, London and Hong Kong. Recent exhibitions include ‘Imagen Vibratoria’ at the Museo Nahim Isaias in Ecuador and ‘on plon air’ curated by 12ø collective in London, UK.
‘My work considers the self-conscious body; the inside and out, the clothing and unclothing, the desperate desire to be seen or the even more desperate desire to be hidden. From the sexy theatre of assertive undressing to the humour and embarrassment of failing coverings, the intimacy of the everyday is put at centre-stage.
Often at a point of transition – half-unbuttoned, mid-haircut with the snipped hairs clumping on our shoulders, the bed as yet unmade – there is a sense of privacy which has been broken down. Invites are issued; the viewer is urged to look in and come closer.
Each painting acts as a frame for this body or for the spaces which that body might inhabit; forms are flattened and illusion is mocked. Ceramic sculptures pretend to be used tools – clogged up and haggard, flouting the need for function.’
Yuiha Yamaguchi has produced artworks of excessive expression as if she has played with the paint itself until now. She tried to find the way to overtake what she had been so far because she realised the limits of the impulsive production method. She gave a rule to her production process which made the process a little awkward. She became able to affirm her desire and impulsive expression by making the system to restrain herself.
Artworks which are beyond her prediction must be produced by thinking and introducing the system controlling an impulsive sensation inside herself. The texture of paints and clay can be directly felt with hands. The real feeling that she is touching something. The rule-making of her production process adds order to this real feeling. And This will become the means for her to connect to the world and the space outside her.