Ellen Sherman
Ann Arbor , MI
Ellen Sherman’s work explores the relationship between fragment and whole; cutting apart her paintings and reassembling individual pieces into collective form.
Message
Ellen Sherman explores the relationship between fragment and whole, cutting apart her paintings and reassembling individual pieces into a new collective form. Her practice centers on the exploration of materials and the meeting of moments planned and unplanned. The cut edge, the gap, the negative space removed: each decision carries the weight of both destruction and construction, chaos held in tension with control.
Ellen received her BFA in Studio Art from Michigan State University and spent a decade in Miami before settling in Ann Arbor, where she maintains a studio and small gallery space. Her work has been shown across the US and internationally, and continues to evolve through an active studio practice rooted in process, material, and the ongoing question of how disparate parts become a whole.
Statement
My work is about material, experimentation and process; the colors and forms are informed by my environment. Through multi-year layered paintings, cut up sketches and old work reassembled, or paintings that stop before they might be considered ‘finished’ I am interested in exploring the nature of making art and our relationship with what we see.
My process is impulse and intuition; reacting to what is happening on the surface of the canvas in that moment. Pools of paint moved by gravity, water soaking through a page, combined with an editing process that might be years out, or immediate and delivered by swift scissors; the moment repurposed into something else.
Everything is both impermanent and permanent and my work is attempting to live in the in-between.
I am seeking out exploration, test and trial, for the discovery of tiny worlds in overlapping pigments and the freedom/excitement/terror of knowing it might be cut apart tomorrow.