Ella Trott is a London-based painter whose practice centres around the relationship between reality and representation. Working primarily in oils with classical techniques, she consults popular media and family archives to create paintings that consider the nature of memory, longing, and the human tendency to romanticise the past. By transforming treasured photographs into oil paintings, she also calls into question the ‘disruptive’ role of photography in the world of painting. 

Ella displays a fascination with what she terms 'life-dysmorphia', the persistent belief that life would be better elsewhere or elsewhen. The destructive, unmissable dissatisfaction with one's current state. Born on the Fourth of July, Ella’s practice is uniquely informed by an imaginative connection to American culture in its most hyperbolic form. This geographical and cultural distance serves as a metaphor for her broader examination of how separation breeds idealisation and obsession. Her recent degree show at CSM, "Until Our Paths Cross," exemplified this approach by exploring her parents' lives before they met.

Through her oil paintings, Ella confronts the bittersweet nature of nostalgia, that peculiar longing for something that perhaps never existed, or was never truly ours.