Ellen Ferrier, 2023 Windmill Trust Scholarship recipient
The Windmill Trust and the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) have announced Ellen Ferrier as the recipient of the 2023 Windmill Trust Scholarship for regional New South Wales artists.
Ferrier will use the $10,000 scholarship to fund material investigations and fabrication of her work for Cementa24 – an immersive installation featuring experimental eco-cements made with problematic plant species from Kandos, a town established and made famous for its cement production.
“As an emerging artist, receiving this scholarship feels like an incredible vote of confidence in my practice,” said Ferrier. “This scholarship will enable me to push the scale and material rigour of the work and collaborate with relevant experts in the field. I feel incredibly blessed to receive the support and encouragement from The Windmill Trust, and excited at the opportunity to enhance and fortify my installation for Cementa24 thanks to this funding.”
Ferrier is an installation artist based in the Northern Rivers region of NSW. Exploring the possibilities of traditional and emergent sustainable materials and technologies, she creates speculative objects and architectures as propositions for a future built on an ethics of care, connection, and reciprocity. With preliminary studies in Interior Architecture, woodfired ceramics, and bodywork modalities, she has cultivated a sensitivity and appreciation of materiality, spatial relations, and the potency of embodied perception. These have all become paramount concerns within her art practice, which foregrounds notions of care, connection, and curiosity towards the natural world.
“Ellen’s vigorous practice demonstrates her sophisticated understanding of the material and the spatial. Her site-conscious installations, that implore an embodied experience, propose new relationships with objects, material and place,” said this year’s assessors, sculpture and installation artist Braddon Snape, and artist and 2022 scholarship recipient Juanita McLauchlan. “Ellen’s installation work evokes a conversation between contemporary art and the voice that can be given for a sustainable art practice and the environment in which we live.”
“Her site-conscious installations, that implore an embodied experience, propose new relationships with objects, material and place. I look forward to watch[ing] her apply her methodologies when working with
