Up Close with Angela Ellsworth

About Angela Ellsworth
Born 1964 in Palo Alto, USA
Lives and works in Phoenix, USA

Angela Ellsworth is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Phoenix, Arizona. Her drawings, paintings, installations and performances explore the female body in its various contexts and constraints. Aiming to connect the body with art, and public with private experience, her solo and collaborative artworks and performances have taken in such wide-ranging subjects as physical fitness, endurance, social ritual, religious tradition, performance art and American colonial history.Ellsworth refers to her rejected Mormon heritage in an elegant circle of antiquated pioneer women’s bonnets, Seer Bonnets: A Continuing Offense (2009–10), constructed out of thousands of pearl-tipped corsage pins with the points directed inwards. These small, beautiful, fetish-like objects not only refer to the tradition of craft work in the home – women’s work – but also stand as disembodied memorials to lives lived suffering cruelty, submission and control.