Ellen Ranson
The physically powerful, expressive and emotionally charged works allow the artist’s emotions to transfer from body to canvas. A broad research base that includes feminist theory, mythology, memory, and landscape navigates the hallmarks of patriarchal art histories. Ranson subverts and intertwines these with references to feminine mythologies, everyday experience, and the often erased narratives of women throughout time. Creating distinctive paintings awash with motifs across culture, time and personal exploration.
In the studio, layered, bodily, gestural and instinctive paintings emerge – drawing on archetypes often associated with the male-dominated Abstract Expressionist movement. They are reclaimed as part of the broader conversation surrounding painting’s gendered past. They capture the artist’s hunger for a greater recognition and a rebalancing of female representation and voices. Not only in storytelling, history, and present day, but in the language of painting. The works seek to unearth the marginalised, whispered and dismissed, contributing to the growing conversation around reclaiming and rearticulating women’s stories and experiences.
Imagery is heavily abstracted through a handmade, labour intensive method that is seemingly digital in its output, whilst remaining tactile and embracing the gestural energy, layered colour, and urgency to interrogate the materials and processes of painting. Each painting becomes a constructed environment, a place where mythologies and material conversations converge and the tools and methods of painting serve as tools of excavation and reimagining.
Ranson’s paintings present us with heavily abstracted constructed environments in which painting reckons with and reimagines itself.
Biography
Ellen Ranson (b.1996) is an abstract painter, she lives and works in the North East of England. She received her MA at MIMA School of Art in 2022. She was the Paint Fellow at Northumbria University (2018), British Council Venice Fellow (2022), and was shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2023.
Exhibitions include: Abstract Vernacular: Continuing Conversations at Sugar House Island with Talking Sculpture Making in 2025, X – Contemporary British Painting in 2023, Sunny Blunts, Revisiting Victor Pasmore’s Utopian Vision (in conjunction with the International Biennale of Non-Objective Art) in 2024 and the Contemporary British Painting Prize exhibitions in 2023 (Huddersfield Art Gallery and Thames Side Gallery).
