HomeAccueilBlogElla Wright: Here I am Here

Ella Wright: Here I am Here
Posted: Nov 14th, 2023 | Gathering

Here I am Here is  a video (5m 57s) by feminist artist Ella Wright in response to four pieces from the collection featured below.

 

 

Here I Am Here is propelled by the power of historic garments to reflect intimate lived experiences while simultaneously revealing broader cultural truth and meaning. This video work is guided by four objects from the Textile Museum of Canada collection, two white dresses and two corresponding slips sewn by Fleta Pollard for a child in the 1920s. With these garments, Here I Am Here explores the multilayered symbolism communicated by a white dress, including inner strength, vulnerability, rites of passage, political activism, and social constraints and prejudices.

In filming white dresses hanging from trees in different landscapes, Here I Am Here references Canadian painter Mary Pratt’s powerful, unsettling 1986 painting Wedding Dress, depicting a wedding dress hanging from a tree. Here I Am Here extends the charged atmosphere of Pratt’s painting to simultaneously evoke presence and absence, foreground misogyny and erasure, and assert the strength and agency of women and girls.

Dress, T2011.3.10a, Fleta Pollard
North America: Canada, Western Canada, Manitoba, Winnipeg, early 20th century
Gift of Marion Leithead
Slip, T2011.3.10b, Fleta Pollard
North America: Canada, Western Canada, Manitoba, Winnipeg, early 20th century
Gift of Marion Leithead
Dress, T2011.3.11a, Fleta Pollard
North America: Canada, Western Canada, Manitoba, Winnipeg, early 20th century
Gift of Marion Leithead
Dress, T2011.3.11b, Fleta Pollard
North America: Canada, Western Canada, Manitoba, Winnipeg, early 20th century
Gift of Marion Leithead

 

 

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Screenshot, Here I am Here video

Artist Ella Wright

Ella Wright is an emerging Ottawa-based, feminist artist with a BFA from the University of Ottawa (2019). The driving impulse of their artistic practice is to explore and give voice to the overlooked histories and practices of women by revealing their systemic subjugation and debasement.
In my work, I examine and uncover the continuation of patriarchal ideologies and structures which continuously label, govern, depreciate, and control perceived femininity. I am interested in the wide impacts of these ideologies whether in the ongoing dismissal and condemnation of women’s mental health and physical pain or in the human disrespect and violation of the environment.
Textiles are my primary medium to investigate these themes due to their shared diminishment and traditional connection to femininity. Like the experiences and histories of women, textile production and history are often erased or rendered insignificant. I also make use of photography, a medium associated with the historic record, as means of questioning dominant narratives that are assumed to be objective.
-Ella Wright

This work is created as part of Gathering, the inaugural installation of our new Collection Gallery, featuring community stories told through our global collection. Grounded in community participation, the installation presents over 40 pieces from the Museum’s permanent collection of over 15,000 objects from around the world. Choices of objects, responses, and retellings were gathered via open online calls for reflection, through partnerships with local organizations, and through artists’ interventions. Gathering explores themes related to migration and diaspora, the search for comfort in the domestic and familial, reclamation of ancestral traditions through contemporary artistic responses, and the relationship between textiles and the environment. 

This video is part of a digital project generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Now initiative.

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