Ella Maris

Piece By Piece

In my work I explore grief and loss, trauma and personal identities. The relationships between family members, the redefining of the self after trauma, and the exploration of mortality, death and loss all contribute heavily to my own personal identity and history and therefore my interactions with the world around me. By exploring and processing my own experiences with these topics, I may expand my audience's understanding of these experiences and encourage them to engage with their own questions on identity, loss and family.

My work often feels inspired by artists like Song Dong, Félix González-Torres, and Damien Hirst from their works dealing with perspective, ritual, memory, impermanence, loss and death. Karl Burkheimer’s views on failure vs. success and process over outcome methods also heavily play into my approaches to my practice as a whole. Alongside these artists, I am also deeply inspired by Judaism and fantasy writing as tools to further engage and develop my conceptual processes.

I approach my work primarily through the means of self engagement, movement, performance and process, preferring the experience of creating a piece rather than focusing on its intended outcome. Using these methods I work most often with textiles, clay bodies and found materials, finding the cultural and historical contexts to be valuable to my work.

Ultimately, my goal within my practice is to create open spaces for grief and to encourage public conversations around generational trauma, loss and identity. By openly exploring my own grief, I hope to allow others to feel more comfortable engaging and talking about their own as well as becoming more open and comfortable with the grief those in their community and those in the broader world around them experience and engage with on a daily basis. Loss does not have to be experienced alone, nor should it be.

@saint.maris