We Have Never Been Only Human
CCA Derry~Londonderry are excited to announce the second Digital Resident of 2023, Ella Yolande.
During the residency, Ella will develop and share their research into the history of medicinal and commodified plants, botanical gardens and seed banks as speculative spaces to consider adaptation, hybridity and future ecosystems.
Through the lens of queer ecology and wildness Ella will explore extractive practices such as plant hunting and categorisation within botany and propose we rethink the idea of an individual body.
Ella's Digital Residency can be read in eight parts here.
We Have Never Been Only Human has been curated by Cecelia Graham.
Ella Yolande (1997) is a visual artist who grew up in Devon where she began studying art, before completing her BA at Edinburgh College of Art, 2019. Driven by a curiosity around interspecies entanglements, metamorphic states and queer ecology, her practice explores the fluidity and resilience of non-human organisms. Through considering the history and medicinal properties of plants as well as the need for mutual flourishing and mutable, multi-species bodies, she explores our interwoven existence with our surroundings through playful thinking on speculative ecologies. She works across video, 3D animation, sculpture, textiles and text to create surreal biomes that reference microscopic life forms, sci-fi and botanical architecture.
Ella has presented her work at various exhibitions, festivals and residencies such as Melkweg (Amsterdam), 11:11 Online Residency, Staffordshire St. Gallery (London), UKNA Sustainability Micro Residency (Leicester), Artcore Gallery (Derby), FIBER Festival and with The Human Cell Atlas.
