Working between London and Essex, painter Ellie Walker creates emotive works that explore the dynamic interplay between control and release through a sustained engagement with materiality. Uncertainty, failure, and re-emergence lie at the core of her practice. Disrupting habitual ways of working, Ellie subjects her canvases to a repetitive cycle of painting, destruction, repair, and reassembly. While some paintings survive intact, others are torn apart and salvaged; their stitched fragments juxtapose raw, stained canvas with restraint and excess, serving as tactile archives of multiple coexisting emotional states.

"This repetitive cycle of painting, destruction, repair, and reassembly allows multiple emotional states to coexist within a single work. Traces of compulsion and failed attempts remain embedded in the surface, often revealing something I did not initially realise the work required."

Ellie earned a BA in Fine Art Painting from the University of Brighton in 2017, completed the Turps Banana Correspondence Course in 2024, and earned her MA in Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School in 2025. Her work has been shown in group and duo exhibitions, including the Lido Open Call, Fire at Twilight Contemporary, and As we read at Rhodes Contemporary. She is a Partnership Editions 2026 Open Call Winner.