the art of embodied ecology
Bryony Ella is an interdisciplinary artist who works with an embodied ecology framework to explore what it means to belong in - and to - a natural world in crisis.
Integrating visual art, performance and installation with creative writing, the studio foregrounds sensory encounters with the natural world to create storytelling experiences and artworks that express human* interconnectedness with the more-than-human world.
* Or humus, Latin for organic matter, earth, soil.
Image: British Council Americas project with COCO Dance Festival, Trinidad. Photographer: Brendan Delzin, 2023.
Moving between the studio, field work and urban public realm spaces, Ella’s practice involves cycles of ‘wild drawing’, painting-‘inklings’ and installation-performances.
She regularly collaborates with researchers and creative practitioners to produce public art projects. Over the past ten years, these have been presented internationally in locations ranging from museums, galleries and festivals to cathedrals, rainforests and hospitals.
Film (below) by Hannah Earl of project with Wellcome Discovery Award researchers Melting Metropolis, University of Liverpool, at Orleans House Gallery, 2025.
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Guided experimental mark-making workshops that prioritise the sensory over the rational.
Engaging qualities of humility, empathy and wonder, ‘wild drawing’ walks are grounding, playful, messy and eco-centric; destabilising human ego-centric ways of perceiving the natural world through simple, abstract and sensory-led exercises.
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Studio ponderings, paintings, or ‘inklings’ in oil, ink and acrylic.
This body of work represents ongoing explorations of embodied ecology through painting.
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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, processes and data.
Browse the ‘Installations’ tab for selected projects
biography
Bryony Ella (née Benge-Abbott, b. 1984) is a Yorkshire-born, Cornwall-based artist of British and Trinidadian heritage. She has a Fine Art BA from Bath Spa University and an MA in Museology from the University of East Anglia.
She is currently 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. This role involves co-supervising a PhD looking at embodied geographies of heat in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and mentoring community storytellers in London and New York. She is also one of the 2025 ReWild Yourself Champions with 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.
Freeling Pocket Park streetscape, photographer: Ewelina Ruminska, 2022
Film: Trailer for The Colour of Transformation, an Arts Council England-supported project with Butterfly Conservation and William Morris Gallery. Film by SDNA, 2022.
Bryony Ella’s artist practice builds upon an exhibitions background at galleries such as The Women’s Library and Wellcome Collection, culminating as Public Engagement Manager for the inaugural exhibitions programme at the UK’s largest scientific research lab, The Francis Crick Institute, in 2016.
In 2019, her 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.
