Ellen Ferrier at The Bathhouse Residency, The Foundations, Portland

Departing Australia for a four-month textile residency in Denmark at Det Vilde Spinderi (The Wild Spinnery), with a prestigious Ian Potter Fellowship, Ellen is continuing on her multidisciplinary ways. No doubt she will create more wild and strange familiars with natural, raw, recycled and newfangled materials. Plans are afoot for her to return to Ireland too where she was not long ago completing her Master of Fine Arts at Burren College of Art.

Her shine will be missed by the community of artists assisting Harrie Fasher at the Portland Foundry, The Foundations. In the lead up to Before Dawn, Harrie’s next solo exhibition at Orange Regional Gallery, November 2025 – February 2026, Ellen, alongside Aiya Dreaming, Bill Robinson and most recently Sam Hopkins have been firing away, pouring bronze and hugging hard beside Harrie’s headship.

Empowered by the luxury of space provided by the north facing Bathhouse studio, Ellen will carry with her the experience of thinking big through creating at scale. The Bathhouse is just one of the heritage buildings on the 80-hectare site of The Foundations that has an artist residency program stirring.

With the light shining through her bioplastic concoctions writhing, groaning and glimmering in the sun on the Bathhouse sills; she has been creating a miscellany of biodegradable gelatinous substances to play with and set scenes. Within these matters are a mass of extracts and additives. She has been experimenting with the likes of red cabbage to create natural blue pigments through a laking process fixing the colour with alum and washing soda and recycling finds such as ludo, a byproduct of Harrie’s bronze casting to add to her new materials.

Her site-specific installation work Touching the world otherwise, 2025 for her NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) Artspace Sydney exhibition, August – October 2025 came into being in and from this place, The Foundations.

Ellen writes:

“Touching the world otherwise presents an ecology of material conversations,

                            contemplations,

collaborations,

                                                        confabulations;

a playscape of fancy and folly;

a fugitive cartography – mapping not what is, but what trembles on the edge of becoming.

These materials – rigid and flexible, translucent and opaque, clear and colourific, planar and undulating – mimic the likes of glass, Perspex, silicon, resin.  Yet they yearn to melt and merge back into the earth with rapidity and ease, leaving no detrimental trace.

This installation speaks to the plural and embodied ways of knowing; to elemental entanglements and fugitives; to the enigmatic intelligence of the more-than-human world.”

With the interplay of afternoon light, this installation floods forth wonderment and query for those who journey in. When comprehension of Ellen’s processes from the pre-industrial to the bio-technological are garnered, an even greater sense of awe swells. Notwithstanding the inviting, delicious character of Ellen’s work, there is a discomfort too, with the work’s fluid biomorphic almost dysmorphic posturing. The work’s playful experimental nature sits well within Ellen’s emerging practice whilst its execution is that of a well-established master.

This exhibition builds from her recent 2025 exhibitions, A tapestry of blood and bone, at Lone Goat Gallery, Byron Bay, a solo exhibition, and True North: from the forest floor, at Grafton Regional Gallery, a group exhibition. She came to Portland, following her exploration creating Field Work in the proximate post-cement town Kandos with a site specific installation at Cementa24 from investigations supported by a Windmill Trust Scholarship.

Ellen’s creative processes make utter sense, for at her core is moral ambition. With a background in interior architecture, she is well-aware of the role that extractive industries play within design, building and construction. Her visceral ache felt from toxic productions coupled with her curiosity and aspirations for brighter processes guides her making. Through reimagining kinder relationships, Ellen’s art is a window into more holistic and joyful pasts, presences and futures.

Ellen Ferrier has been the recipient of The Foundations Mentorship coupled with an Artist-in-Residence at The Bathhouse. The Foundations, Portland supported by Harrie Fasher Studios from May – November 2025.