My name is Ella Ratliff, and I am a first-semester junior pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. I am majoring in Fine Arts with a concentration in Drawing and Painting and minoring in Creative Writing. When I’m not at school, I am based in my hometown of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. 

In my practice, I balance surrealistic high realism with two-dimensional, decorative elements. The duality of detailed figures and appropriated medieval illumination archives my life and thoughts through the act of painting. Manuscripts were visual tools for preserving knowledge, so I incorporate their motifs to examine permanence and control. These flat shapes nod to intangibles—feelings, thoughts, memories—while realism symbolizes physical items. This creates distinctive, visually controlled narratives that are open to interpretation. 

I work primarily with watercolor, and I use the meditativeness of painting to bring the impossible to life. The mediums I use are flexible, allowing me to achieve intricate details through layering processes. These layers allow for self-realization, transforming the intangible into the tangible. Artmaking has become an outlet, a way to chronicle a narrative of my emotions, nostalgia, and experiences. I question my identity through unique compositions, allegories, escapism, and the renewal of old stories. My subjective paintings present myself literally or vicariously through the personas of my childhood plushies. These stuffed animals are extensions of my childhood, and I treat them as if they have thoughts and feelings. My first stuffed animal, Lion, is a motif that recurs to mirror my current identity.