Ellie Harrison is renowned for her large-scale data collecting projects such as Eat 22, Gold Card Adventures and Tea Blog, in which she has recorded information about her everyday routine, over long periods of time. She has also experimented with using this information to question the ‘role of the artist’ and through installations such as the Daily Data Display Wall and The Monthly Sculptures Determined by the Daily Quantification Records, has explored the extents to which the artist’s life can affect the work they produce.
Since 2006, however, Ellie has made a conscious attempt to evolve her practice away from such introspective ways of working. Now a self confessed ‘recovering data collector’, Ellie’s recent internet based works such as the Artist’s Training Programme™ and Work With Me have focused on the notion of what it means to change one’s practice – to undergo a regime of self-improvement and to speculate about what sort of work the ‘perfect artist’ might make and how they might behave.
Within her recent gallery based work, Ellie has begun to take a more collaborative approach to art making. Recent site-specific installations such as Angel Row Jukebox and Self-Destruction (Building Site Ballot) have involved the audience directly – allowing the decisions which they make to actively affect their experience of the work.
Since 2004, Ellie has been part-time lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. She has delivered public lectures at a wide number of academic and art institutions including the ICA London, Modern Art Oxford, Arts Council England (East Midlands), Aspex Gallery Portsmouth, Broadway Cinema Nottingham, the University of Lincoln and the University of Leeds.
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