Bio

Informed by my fascination with words and communicative signifiers, my practice revolves around the ways in which written language can be translated into three-dimensional art objects. Exploring the journey between abstraction and the legible, and the journey through and around structures. Consequently how word and letter forms - legible or abstracted - can tangibly take up space, no longer confined to the two-dimensional.

Words you can trip over.

Skills & Experience
  • Delivered a juried talk on undergraduate research at SUNY New Paltz Undergraduate Art History Symposium, March 2026
  • Commissioned Artist at the Church of The Sacred Heart
To twist, to tend. To morph, to mend.

The Conversational Playground: To twist, to tend is an exploratory installation into how art can cultivate community, inviting interaction beyond just the visual; what it means to physically embody a word.

My practice is rooted in the written word and a desire to cultivate and involve community; both in a temporal and permanent sense. Allowing the works to hold space as sculptures and places for physical - perhaps more childlike - interaction and embodiment.

This installation is the product of dedicating the past 4-5 months to the word ‘tend’. Thinking and conversing about it, musing and writing about it. What it means to be tender, to continuously, habitually be tending to things - physical, emotional, relational and in every area of our lives.

So whilst life may not alway be tender, this first installment of The Conversational Playground stands as an invitation to choose to tend, to mend, again and again. Despite, despite, despite.

Picture of the artist (Ella Crawford) on the 'n frame', Installation view, Edinburgh College of Art Graduate Exhibition 2026

Ella Crawford

The Conversational Playground: to twist, to tend