Ella Smyth
MFA Painting, Room 300A
“Taking a Look Inside,” 20” x 24",” Acrylic paints and inks on muslin and canvas
Ella Smyth’s practice examines the dualities that shape visual culture and lived experience. Her work bridges organic and geometric forms, exploring tensions between the feminine and the masculine, intuition and control, softness and rigidity. Through painting and textiles, she reconsiders the hierarchies that have historically defined how we assign value to artistic materials and ways of working.
Color and pattern are central to this inquiry. Historically dismissed as decorative, emotional, or “feminine,” they have been positioned as lesser than form, mirroring how the feminine has been subordinated to the masculine in both art history and society. Smyth reclaims these elements as sites of complexity and resistance, using them to question why visual pleasure and ornamentation have been excluded from intellectual seriousness. By layering, collaging, and juxtaposing vibrant surfaces with sharp, structured edges, she creates a visual dialogue that resists fixed meaning and asserts color and pattern as powerful tools of thought.
Her process is grounded in play and material exploration. Paint behaves as both surface and structure, often taking on the weight and dimensionality of sculpture. Textiles, woven, printed, or implied, serve as connective tissue throughout her work, referencing Southern histories of domesticity, labor, and communal making. These forms carry cultural memory while allowing for reinterpretation through abstraction and feminist critique.
Smyth’s work blurs boundaries between painting, sculpture, and craft, challenging what is seen as “high” or “low” within the visual arts. By elevating what has been historically undervalued, color, pattern, decoration, softness, she repositions these qualities as sites of intellectual and emotional depth. Her paintings invite viewers to inhabit contradiction, to see harmony within tension, and to imagine systems of value built on balance rather than hierarchy.
Ella Smyth
Ella Smyth (b. 2001) is a multimedia artist and painter from Prattville, Alabama, currently based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She earned her BFA in Painting and Drawing from The University of Alabama in 2023 and is pursuing her MFA in Painting at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
Smyth’s work investigates dualities within art and everyday life, examining the tensions between natural and constructed systems. Through the merging of painting and textiles, she questions visual and cultural hierarchies, considering what occurs when these structures are undone and reassembled. Her practice reflects on why certain modes of making and living are deemed “high” or “low,” and how such systems hinder unity and progress.