dialogue
Ella Fleck | Artist
January 2026
6 min read
Ella Fleck approaches visual art through writing. Her work begins with language, streams of text where voices and characters slowly form, before unfolding into installations shaped by narrative, fiction, and lived reality. The physical work follows the writing, carrying its poetic and metaphorical logic into space.
She works with materials that linger rather than depict: scent, sound, fog, light, architecture. These elements operate like language itself, subjective, unstable, and charged with aftereffects, creating installations that feel inhabited, as if something has just passed through.
Fleck’s practice reflects on control, consent, and power within our digital present, where feelings are constantly monitored and absorbed. Through collaboration and a strong internal logic, she builds spaces that embrace ambiguity and ask us to stay with what can’t be fully seen or explained.
Ella Fleck. Courtesy of the artist and Xenab Lone/Aune Collections.
You studied English literature. How has your background in literature,theory and writing shaped your approach to visual art and installation?
”My work is totally informed by what I learnt when studying and then working as a writer after. I always start with writing and I think of myself as a writer primarily. I write a lot constantly in a stream of consciousness until I can feel a voice forming and then a character. I build the person up through language and research, then insert them into online communities or situations. Then it becomes a kind of weird autofiction - using these fictional voices to interact with real people and play out a narrative. I try not to make anything material until I’ve almost finished the writing or at least gotten somewhere substantial with it - the physical works follow naturally from there. The installations themselves have a kind of metaphorical or poetic logic to them too which comes from this way of working. I’d really like to publish a book one day without an installation but at the moment the hybrid feels good.”
Ella Fleck Spray, Pipes, fans, dilution of pheromones 5α-androst-16-en-3-one (Androstenone), CYIQNCPLG-NH2 (Oxytocin), cover scents, fog, 4 channel audio looped (24 minutes, 4 minutes silence) Music composed by Calum Bowen, 2024-25. Photo courtesy of the artist and Season 4 Episode 6 Gallery.
In your work you use materials including but not limited to: scent, pheromones, fog, audio, architecture. What draws you to these mediums?
“I’m interested in how you can experience a character without imagery or physical bodies present. Like, if somebody were invisible how would you still sense them? In a studio visit recently someone described my work as "dealing with the 'what the f-ness of what just happened?'" - the car has gone, the door has shut, but the feeling still lingers. So that’s how I approach the work. I look for materials that linger, that feel close to language, an extension of it - the voice, scent, music, light, colour, chemical-signals. In language there’s always a gap between how people understand words - the chair in my mind is different from the chair in yours etc. So that ambiguity feels important, or that kind of subjectivity. With architecture I look at things that are infrastructural and designed to be semi-hidden but have a dominating physicality - internet towers, hvac pipe systems, surveillance cameras. Things that reflect feelings in space. Altogether I’m looking to make spaces that have a heavy physical aura.”
Ella Fleck, Small cell, Aluminium, wood, steel, plastic, jiggler lock picking keys, lovelocks, padlocks, cable ties, keys, keychains, speakers, antenna, stuffed toys, cables, accessories, looping audio, performers, animatronic animals, 2023. Photo courtesy of the artist, Henry Dennler and Hector Rosenfalk.
You’ve worked with other artists, curators, collaborators (sound composers, performers, writers). How important is collaboration to your vision?
”I love collaborating. So far it has come very naturally, working with friends or partners who kind of understand the work just through casual conversations. I am lucky to be surrounded by lots of interesting and talented people. I guess you could also say I am secretly collaborating with the communities I insert characters into but that is consensually weird. I think collaborating helps me access materials or ideas that I wouldn’t have the skillset for, and it opens the work up. It’s also fun. Being a spy is lonely otherwise.”
Ella Fleck. Diffuser, Stainless steel, boroscilicate glass test tubes, androstenone, oxytocin, rose water, holy water, cover scents 8 × 16 cm, 2025. Photo courtesy of the artist and Teaspoon Projects X Display Fever.
For younger artists working in interdisciplinary, experimental practices and eager to have their work seen, what advice would you offer on carving out their own path, as you have?
“If your work is interdisciplinary you have to be kind of annoying and stand by decisions that other people don’t understand until they see the finished work. So just follow what you feel is real and find your own logic - that’s the only way to be confident about it. People can sense when something is disingenuous or just copying and it's off putting. Ignore everything that doesn’t fit the world you're making, even if you think people won't like it. Set arbitrary rules for yourself. Exclude everything that feels superfluous - kill your darlings.“
Ella Fleck, Spray, Book. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Your work engages with questions of control, consent, power, desire, how do you think it speaks to the broader societal moment we live in?
“I think these ideas are bubbling around us all the time, they’re like an everyday intrusion. I mean how many times a day do you click a box that “confirms all” to something that you didn’t even read? That has an effect psychologically on how you experience the world. I think we’re at the peak of being obsessed with privacy and consent and power and that is enabled by the way the internet is employed by capitalism, and also what is happening in politics globally. All our feelings are constantly funnelled into capital through the internet, monitored, parsed into data, thrown back in our faces as an advert that just looks like an instagram post, and we absorb it.“
Ella Fleck, Butterfly, Hexadecanal (human body volatile and chemosignal emitted from the heads of newborn babies), fragrances, diffuser and speaker, dimensions variable, 2025. Photo courtesy of the artist.
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