After graduating from Winchester School of Art, Andrea Ellis designed fabrics on a freelance basis and founded the studio “Fabric 8”, selling designs for fashion textiles throughout Europe, US and Japan. In 1995 she moved to Strasbourg where she attended the ‘Ecole des Arts Decoratifs’. She then began her research into the theme ‘Objet,’ which was the birth of her current work on ‘traces’ taking plaster casts of fabrics and found objects. On moving to Bilbao in 2000, she continued this research and collaborated with the Guggenheim Museum on various design projects. In 2005 she returned to the South of France, where she now lives and works as a Textile artist. Throughout her career she has taught extensively in art colleges across the UK. Ellis now combines her expert knowledge of textiles with metaphysical ideas to create her new work.

Ellis’s beautiful three-dimensional pictures have a haunting and ethereal quality with shimmering translucent layers, which evoke a feeling of the antique. There is a strong fantastical and mythical element in her work, and her figures have a timeless quality as though they could have been born into any Century.

“My pieces are mostly inspired by the idea of ‘traces’ or the mark that is left by a presence after its removal; imprints, positive/negative, physical and spiritual, these are all ideas I continue to explore in my work. The technique of silk-screen printing, where the image is created either directly, by placing objects on the screen, or indirectly, with a photograph or drawing, is by its nature, a way of leaving a ‘trace’.”

“My work with textiles is the ‘chemistry set I never had’… My pieces are collaged, embroidered, dyed, washed, steamed, burnt and washed again! Surprisingly, after all this, they are still very robust, because the ‘devoré’ process that I use a lot (Literally Devour when translated) leaves behind a polyester base, after the removal of the silk, linen, velvet, cotton etc …”