Women’s
Acrylic and oil on canvas, 122cm x 82cm, 2025
 
Artwork Statement
Women’s depicts a roadside toilet block. It is isolated and dire but charged with energy, feeling, and memories. The scene pictured conveys countless shared experiences. Through this work, Ellen aims to examine the emotional weight of the mundane and everyday, and the hidden narratives embedded in the spaces we move through.
 
Artist Bio
Ellen Jury explores spaces drawn from her immediate environments, viewed through the lens of her personal experiences. She sources reference material through spontaneous photography taken during daily outings and moments of stillness, often capturing banal, mundane, or transitional places that elicit feelings of familiarity and an eerie nothingness. The resulting paintings reflect the inescapable loneliness triggered by the emptiness of her surroundings.
Her focus on her surroundings in her art comes as a response to a tendency to demonstrate hyper external self-awareness. She has found this is an especially common experience for women. As women, it is ingrained to become acutely aware of themselves. Social expectations encourage constant self-surveillance of appearance, conduct, and overall presence. This internalized gaze can become all-consuming and can pull them inward and away from the world around them. Painting allows Ellen to redirect her analytic focus outward. The works she produces do not ask viewers to turn inward, but instead to consider their engagement with the world around them.