Ella Williams is an emerging Scottish artist whose narrative paintings explore the nature of memory and the challenge of documenting transient experience. Based in Edinburgh and a recent graduate of Edinburgh College of Art (2025), her practice bridges observation and imagination, creating works that function as visual archives of time and place.
Artistic Philosophy
At the heart of Ella's work lies an interest in the productive inadequacies of recording fleeting experiences. She approaches memory itself as a subliminal act of storytelling—a process of recalling and reshaping the past. Her paintings serve as what she describes as imperfect 'translations' of periods of time, acknowledging that visual representation can never fully capture the complexity of lived experience.
Ella Williams' Creative Process
Ella's paintings are constructed from collated observational records gathered over days, months, and years. Sketches, notes, and photographs form the raw material from which she builds compositions. Within each work, domestic objects, patterns, planes of color, and shifting light are assembled into arrangements that move fluidly between abstraction and realism. These disparate elements are unified through careful palette choices and her strategic use of active and negative space across the canvas.
The 'Dwelling' Series
Ella's current body of work, titled 'Dwelling', transfers what she calls "unruly mental records of experience" into visual and material form. The resulting paintings create surreal, liminal environments that suggest non-linear time periods. These compositions are at once spacious and dense with detail, pattern, and imagery—poetic and almost dream-like works that hold viewers through the potency and symbolism of their imagery and the rhythm of her mark-making.
Visual Language
Ella's paintings invite viewers to decipher their own narratives from encoded compositions. Visual partialities become anchors into intangible, expansive periods of time. The works are deliberately latently inaccessible—offering fragments and suggestions rather than complete narratives, mirroring the way memory itself operates through impression and association rather than comprehensive documentation.
Professional Recognition
Despite being a recent graduate, Ella has already garnered significant recognition within the Scottish art world. She was awarded the Royal Scottish Academy's John Kinross Scholarship to carry out research in Florence, as well as the Helen A Rose Bequest. She received the Alexander Flynn Bequest from Edinburgh College of Art in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Mark Astaire Prize in 2024.
Exhibitions and Projects
Ella has been selected as an exhibitor for the RSA New Contemporaries exhibition (2026), a prestigious show representing graduating artists from across Scotland. She also exhibited at the RBA Rising Stars Exhibition at the Royal Overseas League and participated in 'Versions Galore', a collaborative exhibition between Edinburgh College of Art and the Royal Scottish Academy that reinterpreted works from the RSA's permanent collection.
Beyond gallery exhibitions, Ella has completed notable commissions including large-scale murals for The Roastery and a painting for the Intercontinental George Hotel Edinburgh commemorating Susan Ferrier, a renowned Scottish writer. Her work has been exhibited at Graystone Gallery in Edinburgh, where her distinctive approach to narrative painting continues to captivate audiences with its combination of intimate observation and expansive imagination.