Ellie Niblock
Creating new perspectives by combining sculpture and 3D technologies.
Megan Powell | Ed YoungMi Lamine | 9 September 2020
Ellie Niblock (Northern Ireland, 1993) is an artist living and working in London and has an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. She primarily works with sculpture and digital technologies. Niblock is interested in exploring the possibilities of how materiality and technologies can alter our perception of experiences. Her work investigates the relationship between the physical and the digital worlds and how they co-exist.
What’s next?
- December 2020- Digital residency- @digitalartistresidency
- December 2020- With Love: From Nowhere online show- P21 Gallery, London
- Nov 2020-March 2021- Open Submission 2020 Exhibition- Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
- Spring 2021- Artist residency, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield
Did you know?
Ellie’s practice explores the relationship between the physical and the digital worlds and how they co-exist. It seeks to discover how tactility and digital technology can alter our perception of experiences through sculpture, 3D scanning, animation and sound.
She has participated in both solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including working with venues such as The Mark Rothko Centre, Tate Modern and The V&A.
Featured Projects
With Love, From Nowhere: The Places of the Not Yet (2020)
Ellie Nibloc and Alaa Tarabzouni “Zenobia” (2020) © Courtesy of the artists.
With Love, From Nowhere: The Places of the Not Yet (2020) is a digital experience that through meticulous documentation by means of drawing, sculpting, 3D scanning, mapping and audio recording aims to offer the viewer with as much information as possible in order to discern these Places of the Not Yet. Through this excessive bombardment of absurd information, the viewer’s ability to comprehend the places always treads between hyper-specificity and complete ambiguity.
The artists are interested in exploring these notions of the sublime through the lens of utopic placemaking theory. The same way that utopias in architecture exist best as a theoretical practice, the Place of the Not Yet are never fully manifested into tangible spaces. Rather they only ever exist through the viewer’s interpretations of the various forms of the facsimiles created by both artists as representations of their own interpretations. The novel is referenced in the piece through the names of the non-places:Despina, Zenobia and Pyrrha.
The work is a courtesy of The Arab British Centre and the British Council and mentored by Alfredo Cramerotti.
Ellie Niblock, “Nasty Sugar Said Fly, As We Danced On Top Of Mars” (2020) (Ball) © Courtesy of the artist.
Nasty Sugar Said Fly, As We Danced On Top Of Mars (2020)
An animated film exploring the relationship between the digital and the physical worlds and how they interact with one another. Through 3D scanning software, sculpture and photogrammetry, Ellie has created a series of whimsical, animated entities that exist together, flying and dancing in a utopian state. The manipulation of the tactile, physical sculptures to glitchy, digital objects offers an insight into the future possibilities of touch and technology.
The digitised human experiences the allure from the simulated world and encounters the cyber born character ‘Nasty Sugar’ and decides to remain in the idyllic space. Nasty Sugar Said Fly, As We Danced On Top Of Mars explores the hedonist view that pleasure is the solution to happiness.
Ellie Niblock “The Birth of the Bubble Bitch” (2020) © Courtesy of the artist.
The Birth of the Bubble Bitch (2020)
The Bubble Bitch experiences a re-birth when making a transition to the digital world. She finds herself in cyberspace discovering foreign territory. This work seeks to explore the virtual and tactile synthesis, through the combination of silicone cast bodies and their digitised versions. The soundscape was made through distorting voices on a Kaoss Pad. The lines become blurred when viewing the physical world through a digital lens, altering our sense perception.
Agora Talk
Artists Ellie Niblock (UK) and Alaa Tarazbouni (Saudi Arabia) collectively explore the environment both digital and physical through the lens of sculpture and architecture. With Love, From Nowhere: The Places of the Not Yet is an exploration into unknowable places of the not yet, translating an impossible physical experience of visiting the fictional non-places through the combination of drawing, sculpture, 3D scanning, mapping and sound; thus, making the imaginary, intangible spaces comprehendible through the virtual domain.
Key achievements
She was the first artist from Northern Ireland to be awarded an art residency to India in 2016, by The Arts Council of Northern Ireland and British Council. She recently sold work to The Arts Council of Northern Ireland for their permanent collection.
Solo shows
2017 Reading Between The Lines- Framewerk Gallery
2017 Absorption- Ards Art Centre
2016 Entice, Repel? The Crescent Arts Centre
Group shows
2020 Together, Harwich Space, Essex
2020 Portal1.0 Exhibition
2020 Belongings group exhibition, APT Gallery, London
2019 Auction, Lethaby Gallery
2019 Big Space Exhibition, The Crossing, Central St. Martins, London
Residencies
2020 Incubator Residency with Slash Arts, Harwich
2020 Connect Me Residency with The Arab British Centre and The British Council UK
2020 Online BA Group Crit Facilitator, Central Saint Martins, Zoom
2020 BA Group Crit Facilitator, Central Saint Martins
2019 Commission for Electric Picnic Festival, Ireland