Paintings by Bryony Ella join the Richmond Borough Art Collection

We are pleased to announce that three paintings created in the Orleans House Gallery woodland by interdisciplinary artist Bryony Ella are now part of our permanent collection.  

In 2021, as part of Remember the Future, Bryony Ella spent three months in the Orleans House Gallery grounds researching how the practice of drawing of, with and as part of nature and in participation with others, might evoke a deeper sense of attunement with the more-than-human world. This attunement is our empathetic awareness of and response to beings other than ourselves. She calls this practice ‘Wild Drawing’. 

To create the Shadow Dancing series, Bryony suspended the three canvas hangings between trees in our woodland and painted with brush and found natural objects. Each mark represents both the joy and the impossibility of capturing a moment in time as sunlight moves through the woodland; fleeting records of plant life dancing with wind and sun. 

Since this residency at Orleans House Gallery in 2021, Bryony Ella has been working on  her Wild Drawing practice with environmental historians at the University of Liverpool on a Wellcome Discovery Award project called Melting Metropolis, which looks at experiences of urban heat islands in London, Paris and New York from 1945 to the present day. 

For our 2025 Cultural Reforesting exhibition, Bryony Ella will present an installation inspired by Melting Metropolis that integrates her Wild Drawing (or “drawing heat”) explorations of the sensorial experience of extreme heat. Titled ‘My Body is a Sundial’, the installation integrates sunlight as medium and as a presence in its own right alongside embodied, auto-ethnographic mark-making as a methodology to consider our uncanny and changing relationship to the sun. 

The Shadow Dancing works have been displayed in Anima, a solo exhibition with Campbell’s Art Gallery (April-May 2022), and in the group exhibition Lines of Dissent at Orleans House Gallery (September 2022 – January 2023). 

About Bryony Ella 

Bryony Ella is an interdisciplinary artist working in the liminal space between science, spirituality and social justice. 

She paints in the studio, ‘wild draws’ in nature, writes about embodied ecology and creates public realm art installations, often in collaboration with academics following a career in public engagement with science and social history. 

Alongside her studio practice, Bryony is currently the Research Artist on a long-term environmental history project at the University of Liverpool, which is investigating sensory, lived experiences of health and heat in New York, London and Paris. She is also co-author of the recently published ‘Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You’ by the Right to Roam campaign (Bloomsbury, 2024).