Ella Walker - Various Works

Ella Walker (Untitled), TOAST Magazine, 2020

Looking at Ella Walker’s paintings feels like viewing a historical illuminated manuscript, yet her work feels distinctly contemporary in storytelling and themes. Her figures are flattened and everything seems to exist liminally between history and fantasy. I find myself drawn to the way she treats medieval visual language not as a tool locked in the past, but as a set of easily understandable symbols she can remix to tell new stories.

Marina Warner has written about how myths and folktales survive through constant retelling, and I think Walker is doing something similar with images. These works don’t seem to copy medieval forms out of nostalgia; rather they are stitched into contemporary narratives, and this creates a world that is both ancient and current. There’s something feminist about that too, a reclaiming of a visual history where women’s stories were often marginal.

Ella Walker - Cutting Flowers, 2022, Acrylic dispersion, pigment, chalk, and pencil on canvas, 210 x 100 x 20cm

For me, this resonates with how I approach fairytales, decoration, and narrative storytelling in my own practice. I’m not just borrowing “pretty” motifs, I’m interested in how those motifs carry cultural weight, suggest the cyclical nature of history, and how they can be recharged with new meaning by using contemporary aesthetics. History isn’t background material, it’s a collaborator. By pulling fragments from the past into the present, we get to re-script what they mean.

Ella Walker - Queen of the Night, 2022, Acrylic dispersion, pigment, chalk, and pencil on canvas, 210 x 120 x 20 cm