Ella Hepner

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

Painting and printmaking are practices of contact: Like the Veil of Veronica, two surfaces come together to touch and a mark results from the pressure. This process brings me to themes of care and intimacy, moments in which touch and pressure (or the absence of them) are what we long for most. In order for me to make an image, a ground and a matrix must come together, and then come apart. I paint scenes or figures on my concrete floor (hands touching, a whisper, an ear being pierced), onto which I apply layers of medium to develop a skin. Between layers, I move around my studio. People enter, they unconsciously step on the layers. This is part of memory-making, and capture. When I scrape up the medium from the floor, with it comes a print of my painting, plus any disregarded material or residue that was caught in the medium. It carries any new debris myself or others may have introduced. I take advantage of the medium's translucency to build up color and image, collaging other drawings, paintings and prints into, on top of, or behind the skin. The original floor painting references moments or memories. The proceeding process is the evocation or activation of them. It is an attempt to reify or fill in gaps from emotional memory. Contact, build-up, tears that form as I manipulate my substrates: in my art practice, I work through a life-altering loss. The multi-step process, plus the contribution of others, becomes a metaphor for meaning-making. I combine the physical body...

Artwork