About

I am a visual artist and an Adjunct Research Fellow at MADA, Monash University. My practice explores the potential of art to offer new imaginary spaces for encountering the metaphysical, or spiritual. Most often, my work is two-dimensional and abstract. While based in Australia, my work has increasingly taken on a cross-cultural character, since spending time in Taiwan, China and Indonesia.

This website is designed to offer you an overview of the range of my work. I have organised my work into different rooms, with each room showing a coherent series of work that explores a particular theme, with a particular materials. Sometimes the works were produced over a short, intensive period, sometimes they are products of an ongoing stream over years. 

I am currently absorbed by a fascinating project I call, What is Prayer? It draws on my European heritage, my Australian life and my recent stays in China and Indonesia. As part of this, I am talking with people from a wide variety of religious traditions to better understand prayer practices more broadly. I will be developing this project during a forthcoming period in Indonesia.



In pursuit of my passion for ink, on an earlier project researching Chinese ink and paper, Chinese calligraphy and traditional landscape painting, I was fortunate to have an extended residency at the National Taiwan University of Arts. I was intrigued to explore how the spiritual was embedded in their spatial, material and aesthetic visual traditions. 
This was a development from earlier work I produced as part of my practice-led doctorate at the School of Art and Design at the Australian National University called The Metaphysics of Space. I used European inks and papers as well as acrylic paints on linen to explore the spatial traditions of historic European religious art through abstraction.

Overall, I aim to make contemplative, ambiguous compositions that invite the viewer to pause, and hopefully ponder existential questions, supplying cues to prompt without presuming any neat answers. I hope you enjoy the work and you can always contact me on, ella.whateley@monash.edu