Ellen Burchenal is a Baltimore based artist, former MICA faculty, and design professional. Burchenal has spent many summers in Italy, first as a student and then as a teacher, running MICA’s summer program there and teaching at SACI. This time in Italy influenced her work conceptually, but also in the ways she made it. Since leaving teaching, she has been able to spend most days in her studio, and her practice now moves between ornament and structure. Surfaces that appear decorative at first glance, begin to reveal themselves as something more fragile or bodily. Her work pulls from architectural language, baroque excess, and the decorative fragment, reconfiguring these references into forms that feel both theatrical and unsettling. There is a tension between structure and disintegration, where embellishment becomes a kind of residue, clinging to objects as they shift, sag, or mutate. For Burchenal, decoration is not superficial, it becomes a vehicle for examining instability, humor, and the strange persistence of form. Ellen and I spoke in her studio in Baltimore City and bonded over a love of couture fashion and hairstyles, and of course, decorative objects.
Studio visit between Ellen Burchenal and Amy Boone-McCreesh
Amy: Let’s start with the big ideas or themes that are of interest in your work?
Ellen: One of the themes in my work is how we are acted upon by invisible forces in our world and how we react to those forces. So whether it be a portrait or ornamental frame or landscape, I am interested in this form: the illusion of it and its disintegration. And it has its own comedy.
A: Your approach to making art has been open, often using mixed media – can you talk about the different ways you like to work and how you think about your work categorically?
E: I do really like paper right now because it’s just very provisional and accessible. I came from a painting background in grad school, and I became challenged and frustrated by the rectangle, so I really rejected that for a time. So then, starting with one shape and building out with that shape until you felt like you had built a convincing image seemed right to me.
I was doing these pillow forms, but I got over that. Right now I’m using charcoal, collage, paint, ink, paper mache. The (paper mache) pillows are a different process, and it is a way for me to get to know this paint skin that I have been using in different ways on wood panel, paper, and here on 3D forms.
A: Teaching was a big part of your life and also led you to Italy – how did that trajectory impact the art you were making – practically and conceptually?
E: Well, Italy has an enormous influence on my work. I first went there when I was 18 for school. I was introduced to a degree of ornamentation and conversation that was completely contrary to my upbringing. That was a revelation to me. And I continued to travel there and at first doing plein air painting. And then I began spending more time in the south – the hilarity of baroque forms infused so many aspects my life there.
When I was teaching in Sorrento, I started to do a series of small drawings, which I called hotel drawings because I did them in my hotel room. And those turned into a series of large ink jet prints his series. In Florence, I had more time and a studio, and I continued exploring this love of entropic ornamentation. I do love working with students. They show me things I would have never imagined. I am constantly amazed by their work and their energy.
A: How do you deal with periods of feeling down in the studio or hurdles with making art? This could be over the course of a day or a longer season in your life?
E: Well sometimes I just go back to doing meditative repetitive tasks for example paper mache or needlepoint. Because I’m doing something with my hands, that takes away from the very horrible sitting and staring and sitting and staring.
It leaves my mind free to wander around. I do think that I”m more patient than I used to be, meaning I have learned from many disappointing outcomes that sometimes I just have to wait. I cannot force it. I struggle with that. I will get through, but maybe not in the way I thought.
A: Within that studio practice, how do you like to structure your days, your weeks, or your studio time? How does it fit into your regular life?
E: In the 90’s my studio partner and I had an exhibition design and fabrication business. Although the hours were long we could manage it from our studio. So we were in our studio all the time. Then I had a baby, we closed the business, and I started adjunct teaching at MICA. I found teaching took up a lot of time and mental space, and I struggled to switch gears quickly. At the same time, I just loved working with students, and I got the opportunity to run MICA’s summer program in Italy and teach in their program in SACI in Florence. Now that I’m no longer teaching I’m fortunate enough to be in the studio 4 or 5 days a week.
A: What are some of your current influences or areas of research – art related or not – what is holding your interest?
E: Armor, Prince’s puffy shirt, Jane Jetson, Fra Angelico, hairstyles, Hans Holbein, my garden, Neapolitan floor tile, Schiaparelli, Baroque architecture, volcanoes. Also painted porcelain.
