Collection: Ellen McCalmont

@e.s_mccalmont

Ellen McCalmont is a multi-disciplinary artist working primarily as a painter. Centring the interplay of light, shadow, and space, her works use chiaroscuro to merge the unsettling and the beautiful. Dark, enigmatic figures are glimpsed in the half-light of a hallway, a road, a doorway; surrounded only by blackness – unmoored from place and time. In this space, the imagery has a symbolic quality, evoking an atmosphere of poetic dread.

Inspired by horror films, and the recent focus within the genre on psychological and metaphorical narratives, Ellen’s paintings transform cinematic scenes into open-ended questions, suspending time to let their resonance unfold, and inviting a new regard for a genre often overlooked and dismissed. This translation from film to oil paint elaborates and distils the atmosphere and emotion of each scene through the colour palette. In this place of darkness, of static time, there is the space to look inwards.

That sense of alienation when you are alone in the dark, distanced from yourself and others – is characteristic of our moment in history. Our art, our horror, reflects this back at us; asking us to question our place in the wider universe.