ella trott

Ella Trott (b. 2001, Bristol, UK) has spent the past few years painting her family. Not in formal portraiture, but as almost devotional recreations of fleeting moments from her family archive. Snapshots of her parents before she was born, friends in bars, intimate domestic scenes - all rendered in a perfected, Hollywoodised manner. Since graduating from CSM, where she explored these themes alongside the Welsh concept of hiraeth - that inexplicable longing for a place you’ve never been - Ella has been interrogating memory, idealisation, and the act of preservation itself.

Her most recent body of work refines and exaggerates the key characteristics of her practice. The paintings vary in scale: some remain intimate, echoing the size of photographs, while others expand to monumental proportions, transforming private snapshots into something public, almost iconic. Colour has also evolved dramatically, with sepia underwashes giving way to saturated pinks, greens, and blues.

Perhaps most compelling is what Ella chooses to omit. Faces blur into a haze, distant figures fade into memory, and in larger compositions, extraneous details are removed as a Hollywood director might streamline a scene, perfecting the moment to iconise it. These acts of omission mirror the workings of memory itself, showing how fleeting moments are continually reshaped by desire, attention, and the mental corrections we impose on the past.

Across all her work, Ella consistently probes questions that run like a thread through her practice: the human urge to remember, to idealise, to distort and disrupt reality, to preserve and record, and to capture fleeting experience forever, exactly as imagined, in paint.

Ella Trott graduated with a first class degree in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in 2024. The catalogue from her Crème Fraîche salon show (May 2025) can be viewed here.