Bryony Ella is an interdisciplinary artist who works with an embodied ecology conceptual framework, exploring what it means to belong in, and to, the natural world.
Integrating visual art, installation, creative writing and performance, her studio foregrounds sensorial encounters with the natural world, centring the body as a portal to more expansive, empathetic and eco-centric understandings of human-nature interconnectedness. Interweaving diverse cosmologies and temporal dimensions, her practice has evolved into an ongoing studio-focus of the human potential for - and resistance to - transformation, through and for our relationship with the more-than-human world.
the art of embodied ecology
Image credit: from British Council Americas project with COCO Dance Festival, Trinidad, 2023. Photographer: Brendan Delzin.
Moving between studio, plein air and public realm, Ella’s practice involves cycles of ‘wild drawing’, painting, creative writing and installation-performances. Her studio regularly collaborates with academics and artists, designing, co-creating and directing public engagement projects that are inspired by environmental, ecological and climate research.
-
‘Wild drawing’ is essentially the art of noticing through embodied attentiveness to our surroundings.
Engaging qualities of humility, empathy and wonder, the practice prioritises the sensory over the rational through experimental exercises that are grounding, simple, playful, messy and eco-centric.
-
Studio ponderings, paintings, or ‘inklings’ in oil, ink and acrylic.
A body of abstract figurative explorations of embodied ecology through painting.
-
Public artworks / collective wonderings on what it means to be human in relationship with the more-than-human world.
Developed through academic and artist collaborations, these interdisciplinary projects focus on engaging the public in research questions and processes, balancing data with wonder.
Browse the ‘Installations’ tab for selected projects
Above: Image of Freeling Pocket Park streetscape, photographer: Ewelina Ruminska, 2022
biography
Bryony Ella (née Benge-Abbott, b. 1984) is a Yorkshire-born artist of British and Trinidadian heritage. Her studio is based in Cornwall, south west England. She has a Fine Art BA from Bath Spa University and an MA in Museology from the University of East Anglia.
Over the past ten years, Ella’s artworks have been presented internationally in locations ranging from museums, galleries and festivals to cathedrals, rainforests and hospitals, her paintings acquired for private and public collections, and permanent mural installations undertaken across the UK.
Ella’s public realm practice builds upon a public engagement background with museums such as The Women’s Library, the V&A Museum of Childhood and the Wellcome Collection, culminating in 2016 when she established the first exhibition programme at the UK’s largest scientific research lab, The Francis Crick Institute.
Currently, she is Research Artist on a long-term Wellcome funded project (Melting Metropolis) with environmental historians at the University of Liverpool and Queens College City University of New York. Here, she is also co-supervising a PhD researching embodied geographies of heat in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and mentoring community storytellers in London and New York.
In 2019, Ella’s commitment to science engagement with a social justice focus through public art was acknowledged by the Mayor of London, who highlighted her as part of the city’s centenary International Women’s Day celebrations.
Since then, she has worked on public and participatory projects with organisations such as the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, the British Ecological Society, University College London, Butterfly Conservation, the Grantham Institute - Climate and the Environment at Imperial College London, William Morris Gallery, Patagonia, COCO Dance Festival Trinidad, Octopus Energy, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, LDA Design, Oxford City Council, Islington Council and Fusion Arts Oxford.
Ella is a 2025 ReWild Yourself Champion for the Voice for Nature campaign and co-author in Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You, published by Bloomsbury with the Right to Roam campaign, 2024.
Above: Film ‘The Making of Stand of the Sun’ by Hannah Earl, commissioned by Wellcome Discovery Award project Melting Metropolis at the University of Liverpool, 2025.
