Ellie Waters United Kingdom
A photo-based artist, through my own history of emigration, from Northern England to Aotearoa, New Zealand (and back and forth..) my work is concerned with notions of home and belonging and how we identify with our surrounding landscapes. I am currently engaged with various long-term social documentary projects, and the digitisation of my late grandfather - M J Burgess - photographic archive.
At the heart of my practice is story-telling, and how through the use of photography, audio, text and video we can effectively portray a set of narratives.
My love for documentary photography spurred from my studies at the University of Canterbury, where I studied under various well-known documentary photographers. It's here that I began to admire the impact of such form of story telling and how it can be used to platform prevalent issues within our society, those which can be often easily overlooked.
I am interested in our built, domestic environments and what these spaces say about ourselves and our communities. I often work on long-term projects, which include members of these communities, offering space for them to tell their own stories in their own ways.