Meet Ellie Bond
This year we’re celebrating 10 years of Colonnade House and will be sitting down with 10 artists to hear all about their creative practices. From painters, illustrators, sculptors and more, each artist is just one of the many who have been a part of Colonnade House over the years.
We visited Ellie’s studio to hear all about her creative practice and her work at Northbrook. Read on to find out more.
Can you tell us a little about your art practice.
I guess I’d say I’m sort of a multimedia artist really. I got into stained glass through lockdown, it was kind of my thing. I embarked on making as many little birds out of stained glass as I could because I just wanted to create something big with lots of little pieces and I think that’s kind of carried on in my art.
Can you tell us about your work with Northbrook?
I co-run the Art Foundation course which is a year course in Art and Design. There could be up to 60 students in the cohort, but in recent years it hasn’t been as many as that which is good for the students because they get the tutor time. There’s three of us who are practising artists that teach. I head up the 3D pathway and the Textile pathway. I’m really inspired by the students mostly, I absoloutely love working with them.
Tell us about your favourite artwork.
I live within my studnets and thier work and their inspirations and actually, a lot of them are looking back at Art History and they’re bringing back traditional crafts. The course is becoming more crafty rather than fine arty, maybe because I’m teaching on it, but maybe because that’s the way the World’s going. People are really invested in their folklore, and their tales. It feels like it really resonates with me to have a narratvie, to kind of believe in something that isn’t necessarily religion.
It just makes me feel lovely when I’ve had a full day of teaching and I’ve been having tutorials, listening to all of these lovely ideas and such passion and energy and ambition. I just come home and I don’t sit on the sofa, I’ll go out into my studio because I just need to keep working. I need to put all of these ideas that have been processing all day in my head to work.
What did exhibiting at Colonnade House lead to?
Colonnade House has just been amazing for me to build my confidence up. I hadn’t exhibited anywhere before. At first I did it was Anna Vartiainen, we did a show called, Welcome to Paradise. It was very bright and bold and at the time, I was doing screen prints and collages. It was just lovely to do it with a friend because we were sort of nudging each other on and just going for it.
I look forward to going to Colonnade House, and ever since that exhibition, I’ve had a couple more exhibitions in there with tutors from Northbrook as well which has been great. It’s made me think you don’t have to be, you know, the world’s most famous artist. You don’t have to be really well known. It’s just putting yourself out there and being brave enough to hang some stuff on the walls.
Colonnade has kept me connected really and it’s opened up more opportunities. It’s got my name out there a bit. I’ve managed to connect with other artists. I’ve had collaborations. I’ve been involved in community projects, recently the Worthing Festival has been amazing. All this has really come from having a place to show my work and being able to gain the confidence to do that and it’s a really lovely space. I feel like a proper part of the art community, so it’s been really lovely.
Tell us about an artist you think we should know about.
Sheila Hicks had a really lovely big exhibition where you walked into a bright white room, full of absoloutely enormous, brightly coloured textiles, textures and forms. I’ll always absoloutely love texture and textiles and I’ll always have fabric as well. I’ll always get secondhand fabric, go to the scrap space, pick up a load of lovely materials and whether I make clothing with it, or whether I make wall hangings or sew into it. She’s a massive inspiration.
