Ellie Works, as seen to the left, (b. Seattle, Washington, 2003) is a Baltimore-based painter, drawer, printmaker and iPad-video maker. In 2025 she recieved her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in Painting and Printmaking. She enjoys walking with no destination and right now, the color fushia.
Artist Statement:
During my daily walks across the North Howard street bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, I experience the convergence of time, movement, and history–residues of seemingly contradictory ways of life. Vehicles race above and below on the expressways, billboards advertise free STD testing while personal injury lawyers tower over the quietly flowing Jones Falls river. The undergrowth of the river bank pushes against railways and asphalt. Time is materialized in graffiti and accumulated litter collecting beside the road. The sunset expands across the horizon.
The things I find–collected beer cans, cement shards, love poems, rubber gloves, and security cameras–activate my paintings. I produce modified surfaces composed of found objects, playful depictions, and gestural mark-making. Xeroxed puppies dance and fight rhythmically alongside human forms rendered in lavish, colorful paint. I construct these paintings to existentially contend with unrelated parts. My task is to make these discarded objects become subjects. To produce meaning within the debris–a vivid ecosystem of disuse.
This interrogation of material hierarchies–the discarded vs. the revered–produces sites of crisis and instability but also unexpected kinship. These sites are oxymorons best understood through a tragicomic lens. The seductive, illusory qualities of paint bemuse and beguile as a counterpoint to the found materials plucked straight from the pavement. The traditional flat plane of painting becomes a space of juxtaposition and contradiction, of self-criticality and self-reflexivity.
These paintings are analogues of lost identity. I want to recuperate the deprived autonomy of commodified objects, surveilled bodies, and environments prone to ecological degradation. My paintings are structures to work through and against in the search for cohabitation and understanding.