Formally speaking -
Working primarily with constructed textiles, Ella Fredman is a contemporary fibre artist and writer, born 1998 in London, where she continues to live and work.
Having studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, Fredman’s background is rooted in typical media; painting, sculpture, installation, and printmaking. Borrowing elements from various mediums, her practice has converged more recently into constructed textiles, with her current body of work using traditional machine tufting.
These developments offer an expanded approach to painting and flat image: she considers her tufted works to be tactile paintings - bringing the often sterile environment of the art gallery into the warmth of the home. Viewers are encouraged to touch, feel and interact with the pieces, to engage their senses.
It’s about the tangibility of emotion and how the therapeutic nature of craft can be used as a communal opening. Her work seeks a cathartic return to, or reimagining of the physical grounding of handmade skills, rejecting the obsolete modes of craft and art; instead she treats their symbiosis as given.
Whilst her use of traditional domestic crafts situates itself unapologetically in the realm of political commentary and feminist resistance, she also invites you to question the assumptions of domestic labour, and consider the the potential of such processes outside of the assumed binary.
Her approach to work draws on deeply personal experiences, offering her vulnerability to the viewer as abstract material.This process of autobiographical abstraction and confession allows her to examine the micro politics of her own mental health struggles, and to augment these experiences into the wider macro politics of society in general.
Fredman is then able to explore the complex discourse surrounding mental health issues, from the societal stigma, to Hollywood’s fetishisation, and perhaps most poignantly, to the dissonance between internal and external, or private and public.
cathartic process
cathartic process
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