GUEST ARTIST: ELLA PORTER
- aliceguillaume3
- Aug 21
- 2 min read
Updated: Aug 26
It was a real pleasure to welcome Ella Porter as our guest artist to kick start the new year in January 2025. Ella has a longstanding relationship with Culford Studios—she was once a resident artist and continues to teach our popular Tuesday evening course. It was inspiring to gain a deeper insight into her practice and hear how the twists and turns of life have shaped both her creative process and the intimacy of her final pieces.
Primarily based in London, Ella maintains a strong connection to the Norfolk coast. Her multidisciplinary work spans ceramics, printmaking, and beading, often exploring tactile textures and architectural form. She plays with light, surface, there is often a quiet invitation to pear between inner and outer spaces inviting both interaction and reflection.
Ella studied Drawing at Camberwell College of Arts, followed by Painting and Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art, and completed her MA at the Royal College of Art in 2021, supported by the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust. Since then, her work has been widely exhibited, including as a finalist for the Ingram Prize in 2021, and features in both public and private collections.
A few words from Ella:
“I am drawn to clay’s unique ability to preserve the act of making, as both conscious and unconscious moments of touch are held in the surface of the ceramic object. My practice displays a strong relationship between surface and form, informed by my BA in painting and printmaking and MA in Ceramics and glass. I refer to historic ceramic artefacts, social and painting theory, as I explore ideas surrounding the mark of the maker, temporality, trace and place. Careful and subtle interventions, made at strategic points during the mutable state of the clay, are what bring my works into being. By visually scanning the surface of an evolving work, I read the unconscious impressions it may have picked up, these directly inform the conscious actions I impose on the clay. Throughout the making of a work there is a continual shift between layering and erasing; a conversation with the material. I sense the conclusion of a work when I reach a place of wanting to hold onto what is left - a sense of something pre-existing revealing itself.”
To learn more about Ella's work:
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