Ella Williams is an Edinburgh based painter. Her work approaches how places and transitory experiences can be documented materially through paint, examining how fleeting observations can be narrativised.

Her large scale works operate as imperfect ‘translations’ of non-linear periods of time. Each composition is  informed by an experiential ‘archive’ of images, gathered through observational and diaristic practices. These visual partialities become anchors into intangible, expansive swathes of time, disparate imagesthrough which the viewer can implicate a whole in a collaborative act of ‘fictioning’.

Informed by a breadth of narrative contexts - from the compositionally rich symbolism of medieval panel painting to modernist literary practices, the work incorporates traditions of visual communication - linearity, repetition and symbolism. Conceptions of the past are mythologised through re-arrangements of visual ‘anchors’, motifs born of the routine and symbolic.

Memory is considered as a subliminal act of storytelling, recalling and reshaping the past, and the viewer is welcomed to decipher their own narratives from these encoded compositions.

These resulting paintings are imagined as liminal, latently inaccessible environments. Varying planes of perspective and scale complicate the surreal from the banal, establishing the inaccessibility of remembered space; a domestic scene is disrupted by the weave of a fish.

image credit Ella Markell

 Exhibitions and Projects

  • I have been selected as an exhibitor of the upcoming New Contemporaries Exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy, a show that curates and represents a selection of graduating artists from across Scotland.

    You can read more about the exhibition via the RSA here:

  • I have produced a series of work to be exhibited by Morningside Art Gallery at Battersea Affordable Art Fair this October from the 15th to the 19th you can view a catalogue of available works here:

  • I exhibited series of large scale paintings, the culmination of a project titled ‘Dwelling’, examining narrative memory,

    I was fortunate enough to be awarded:

    The RSA John Kinross Scholarship, as well as the Helen A Rose Bequest

  • A duo of large scale murals commissioned for Uplands Roast’s new bar , The Roastery.

    You can view photographs of the process of the project here:

  • I was selected as an exhibitor at the RA Rising Stars exhibition in the spring of 2025.

    View more information here:

  • An exhibition at the Kimpton Charlotte Square celebrating female artists based in Scotland.

  • I was commissioned to produce a painting commemorating the anniversary of Susan Ferrier, a renowned Scottish writer and former resident at the Hotels seminal work ‘The Inheritance’.

    You can view more about this project here:

    Or read about the project via The George here:

  • I exhibited a triptych of paintings as a part of the group exhibition, Versions Galore at the RSA, a show of works that sought to reinterpret existing pieces held in the RSA’s extensive permanent collections.

    You can view more about the project here: