Nicola Ellis Greater Manchester, United Kingdom
Manchester-based visual artist working across sculpture, printmaking, moving image and installation. My practice explores how labour, knowledge and value are carried through materials, tools and industrial systems, often through long-term engagement with workplaces and the people whose expertise sustains them.
My practice explores how labour, knowledge and value are carried through materials, tools, industrial systems and the people who work within them. I am particularly interested in forms of practical, tacit and embodied knowledge that are often essential to a workplace or process but remain difficult to record or communicate.
Working across sculpture, printmaking, moving image, installation and digital processes, I develop projects through sustained engagement with particular environments. These have included manufacturing workplaces, scientific research settings, archives and post-industrial landscapes. My work often begins by observing or participating in an existing process and considering how its materials, methods and forms might be redirected towards an alternative purpose.
Since 2018, I have maintained an ongoing residency at Ritherdon & Co. Ltd., a steel enclosure manufacturer in Darwen, Lancashire. This long-term relationship has allowed me to work closely with employees, machinery, production systems and materials including sheet steel, powder coating, industrial liquids and manufacturing residues. I use the conditions and material cycles of the factory to produce sculptures, prints and moving-image works that foreground the intelligence, dexterity and decision-making embedded within everyday work.
More recently, I have been developing printmaking processes using industrial components as printing plates and exploring ways of taking direct prints from rock surfaces in post-industrial landscapes. Across these projects, I am interested in how materials can retain physical records of the environments, actions and systems through which they have passed.
My work asks who values particular materials, skills and forms of knowledge, how those values change between contexts, and what becomes visible when familiar processes are interrupted, translated or placed within an artistic setting.
