a solo exhibition from Ella Yolande
Private View: Wednesday 14th August 2024 16:00 - 19:00
Opening Hours: Thursday 15th - Sunday 18th August 2024 12:00 - 18:00
Location: Nunhead Cemetery Chapel
BOOKING IS NOT ESSENTIAL
This exhibition is part of the Summer series from the FLP x Friends of Nunhead Cemetery Curatorial Program.
Feminist Lecture Program and Friends of Nunhead Cemetery are proud to present “Find us in the slip spaces”, a series of new works by Ella Yolande, in response to Nunhead Cemetery, its plant histories and the site's role as a nature reserve. On Wednesday 14th August at 16:00 there will be a live performance from artist Pheobe riley Law activating the exhibition - all are invited to attend!
Tangled in thoughts about the vegetal, wildness, seeds and our messy, multi-species bodies, Yolande’s practice is informed by queer ecologies, ideas of resilience, preservation and the more-than-human. This solo exhibition showcases textiles, plant matter, digital print and sound. The works draw on plant histories and symbology, land based folklore and thin spaces. The central space is inhabited by a textile archway embedded with medicinal and symbolic plants, slowly gathered from around the cemetery. Touching on ideas of thin spaces within folklore, the sculpture provides a portal through which to imagine what might lie just on the other side, moving just beneath the surface of our understanding of the perceived world.
In The Synthetic Sacred, Lucy Rose Sollitt talks about how 'thinness points to the sacred and our leaky relationship with what’s at the edge of understanding and rational'.
Yolande is interested in finding these slippery spots where the veil between the seen and unseen world becomes thinner and how we might access a sense of the sacred through the vegetal and the hybrid messy ecologies we live within.
The vibrant matter of vegetal beings can act as historical agents and storytellers. A series of new images created from 3D scans of plants found around the cemetery, facilitate encounters with some of these organisms, with specific reference to the importance of the linden tree and medicinal plants often overlooked as weeds, such as nettle. These symbol-like forms draw on the history of plants becoming symbols of wealth and status during the Victorian era, as highlighted in the fern fever (Pteridomania) and orchid fever craze.
Among these, a scattering of seedbombs lie across the floor, waiting for visitors to pick up and take with them.
The space is punctuated by a soundscape made in collaboration with artist Pheobe riley Law, that works with this idea of thinness, rips, tears and the activating of micro-worlds through non-human sound.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Tangled in thoughts about the vegetal, wildness, seeds and our messy, multi-species bodies, Ella Yolande’s practice is informed by queer ecologies, ideas of resilience, preservation and the more-than-human. She works across video, 3D animation, sculpture, textiles and text, with references to speculative fiction, botanical architecture and protective wear. Through considering the history and medicinal properties of plants as well as the need for mutual flourishing and rethinking the human body as individual, she explores our interwoven existence with our surroundings through playful thinking on speculative ecologies.
Based in London, Ella is currently working from her studio with Arebyte.
She studied art in Devon where she grew up, before completing a BA(Hons) in Intermedia at Edinburgh College of Art, 2019. Her work has been exhibited internationally at Skaftfell Seyðisfjörður, Melkweg Expo Amsterdam, Staffordshire St. Gallery London, Artcore Gallery in Derby, with several screenings including the Coventry Biennial 2024, Videoity’s Utopia Today 2024 and Fiber Festival 2021. Recently she was a participant of LungA School Art Programme 2023 in Iceland and CCA Derry~Londonderry’s digital artist in residence.
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/ellayolande/
WEBSITE: https://ellayolande.co.uk/