Two paintings stare at each other across the room, a framework of energy surrounding the kitchen table between them. The paintings hint at poetry, with only fragments of lines protruding from their eroded structure. The sheets that form the boundaries of their worlds are worn thin but are preserved between wood and under glass.

Upon the table in the centre of the room, a galvanised steel platter sits. The platter is festooned with small translucent jellies, off-white in colour with clear edges. Electrical and craft wires pierce the jellies, connecting them to each other, binding them in interdependence and organisation. With time, the jellies shrink and begin to grow mould, and so too does their organisation fail.

The jelly speaks to the paintings speaks to the table speaks to the platter speaks to the floor; in this space they converse, change, and in due course become the unwitting seedbed of new life. Theirs is a finitude not unlike our own.

Ella Bunker is an artist living in Boorloo/Perth.

Their practice consists of painting and sculpture works with agar jelly, wire, dough, cake, and found objects. Ella’s work is intrinsically linked to their mental illness, with its formal qualities often derived from the visual phenomena they experience.

Their work concerns embodiment, attempting to reconcile the mess and rot of the physical world with the absolute domain of the mental; impressions are realised playfully, but with the transience of their organic material always foregrounded.

Ella actively documents their work via Instagram, recording the lifespan of each piece from beginning to end and occasionally intervening on them by destroying or resituating them.