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Ella Williams, The Tombola at the Village Fete£ 1,300.00
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Ella Williams, Summer Longings£ 900.00
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Ella Williams, We Walked Down by the Canal£ 800.00
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What Makes Ella Williams' Work Unique
Ella's practice is rooted in what she describes as the productive inadequacies of painting as a medium for capturing memory. A painting cannot reproduce how something was exactly, and it is precisely this gap between experience and representation that makes her work so compelling. Freed from the obligation to document literally, her compositions distil remembered moments into their most vivid essentials: a pattern of tiles, a blue-and-white teacup, the pink glow of a summer evening. These fragments become anchors into expansive, intangible periods of time.
Her current body of work, titled Dwelling, transfers what she calls "unruly mental records of experience" into visual and material form. Each painting is constructed from collated observational records: sketches, notes, and photographs gathered over extended periods, then assembled into compositions that move fluidly between the recognisable and the abstract. Domestic objects sit alongside architectural fragments, patterns overlap with planes of colour, and figures appear and dissolve within layered, dreamlike environments.
The paintings created for this exhibition at Graystone Gallery extend these themes into the territory of place and belonging. Works like There Were Tiles in Our Front Porch and We Walked Down by the Canal root her explorations of memory in specific, intimate locations. The Tombola at the Village Fete, the largest work in the group, weaves together the sensory fragments of a communal event into a composition that is at once festive and wistful, capturing the particular quality of a day that exists now only in recollection.
Technically, Ella works in acrylic on board and canvas, building her surfaces through careful layering. Her palette tends towards soft, luminous tones, pinks, pale blues, warm yellows, and muted greens, punctuated by moments of vivid pattern and bold colour that draw the eye through the composition. There is a confident looseness to her mark-making that belies the careful construction beneath: each work balances spontaneity with deliberate compositional architecture, creating paintings that feel simultaneously immediate and deeply considered.
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"Ella's paintings are visual archives of lived experience, constructed from the fragments that memory chooses to preserve. Her work captures something we all recognise: the way a place or a moment lives on in our minds not as a complete picture, but as a constellation of sensory details, a colour, a pattern, the quality of light on a particular afternoon."
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Ella Williams
There Were Tiles in Our Front PorchAcrylic on board
Unframed size: 46 x 61 cm -
Spotlighting Ella Williams at Graystone Gallery
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We are always looking for artists whose work brings a fresh perspective to contemporary Scottish art, and Ella Williams represents exactly the kind of emerging talent we are proud to champion. Her paintings offer something genuinely distinctive: a sophisticated engagement with memory and narrative that never feels cerebral or distant. Instead, these are works of immediate visual appeal, rich in colour, pattern, and compositional energy, that reward extended looking with deeper layers of meaning.
Despite being a recent graduate, Ella has already established a remarkable trajectory. She was awarded the Royal Scottish Academy's John Kinross Scholarship to carry out research in Florence, received the Helen A Rose Bequest in 2024, and the Alexander Flynn Bequest from Edinburgh College of Art in 2023. She was shortlisted for the Mark Astaire Prize and has been selected as an exhibitor for the RSA New Contemporaries exhibition in 2026. Her work has also been shown at the RBA Rising Stars Exhibition at the Royal Overseas League and in Versions Galore, a collaborative exhibition between Edinburgh College of Art and the Royal Scottish Academy.
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Beyond the gallery, Ella has completed notable commissions including a large-scale mural for The Roastery and a painting for the Intercontinental George Hotel Edinburgh commemorating Scottish writer Susan Ferrier. We are delighted to present her work to our collectors and believe she is an artist whose career will be followed with great interest in the years ahead.
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Available to buy
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Ella Williams, A Walk Home£ 700.00
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Ella Williams, Ice Cream£ 900.00
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Ella Williams, Summer Longings£ 900.00
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Ella Williams, The Tombola at the Village Fete£ 1,300.00
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Ella Williams, There Were Tiles in Our Front Porch£ 900.00
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Ella Williams, We Walked Down by the Canal£ 800.00
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