Ella Williams is an Edinburgh-based painter and recent graduate of Edinburgh College of Art (2025). Shaped by diaristic and archival processes, her work visualises the ambiguity of memory – revealing how fleeting and fragmented observations, gathered over time, can be reshaped into visual storytelling. Poetic and almost dream-like Ella’s paintings hold the viewer through the potency and symbolism of their imagery and the rhythm of her mark making.
At once spacious and dense with detail, pattern and imagery, Ella’s paintings are composed from sketches, notes, and photographs collected across days, months, and years. Within each work, domestic objects, patterns, planes of colour and shifting light are assembled into compositions that move between abstraction and realism – disparate elements are woven together by palette choices and her use of active and negative space across the canvas.
Ella was selected as an exhibitor for the 2025 RBA Rising Stars Exhibition at the ROSL and was recently awarded the Royal Scottish Academy’s John Kinross Scholarship to carry out a research project in Florence. She was also selected to exhibit in the RSA New Contemporaries 2026 exhibition. In 2023 she recieved the Alexander Flynn Bequest, Edinburgh College of Art, and in 2024 she was shortlisted for the Mark Astaire Prize.
