The Winter Drawings
Continuities between human and non-human life. Figures and natural forms share phenotypic echoes, suggesting connection rather than hierarchy. Introspective and symbolic, the works reflect on instinct, vulnerability, coexistence and interdependence. Consider yourself shaped by the same adaptative forces.
The Sound of Time, Dec 2025
Pencil on cartridge paper, 28x35cm
The collecting magpie silences age, as it reflects on the accumulations of the world, natual and manmade, large and small, fresh and faded.
The Natural World, Dec 2025
Pencil on cartridge paper, 28x35cm
Watchfulness and rest. An eye, like a seed or a fruit, alert and glowing, while the lamb lies quietly. Nothing feels dramatic, yet everything feels alive—observing, breathing, waiting.
“The natural world” is about coexistence rather than hierarchy. Innocence and awareness, vulnerability and shelter, placed side by side without explanation
The See, Jan 2026
Pencil on cartridge paper.
The See...the space where thought drifts. A face submerged among fish, shells and drifting forms, a mind at rest but not empty—absorbing, listening, sensing its surroundings. The sea is not just a place, but a state: reflective, fluid, ambiguous and acceptably unsettling.
Bind Thee to Me, Jan 2026
Pencil on cartridge paper.
Things fragile, fleeting and instinctive: hands, wings, leaves. They overlap and blur...caught mid-movement, mutual edges...a shared extistence. The hand of care and control, birds and butterflies for freedom, the patterned coats of woodland creatures to disguise and dissolve animals into plants.
Beneath Every Ship, Jan 2025
Pencil on cartridge paper.
Underlying all things is the female body and most especially when we face storms and fears and hope for safety we wish to go home, to port, to the ground of the universe. The ship is held in the protective arm of the giant woman who lives beneath the waves...simultaneously, the ship is her head, mind, thoughts.
From The Tower, Jan 2025
Pencil on cartridge paper.
Instinct, tenderness, myth. The hare— grounded —anchors the image, while the dreamer reaches and drifting flowers move like thoughts across its surface. Elements overlap without hierarchy, as memory and feeling do, forming a space where human vulnerability meets animal intuition. The collage resists a single reading, instead inviting the viewer int
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Framed for Hanging
Valerie Ellis's Creative Universe
The Winter Drawings 2025/6
This body of work brings together human, animal and natural forms to explore continuity across living systems through drawing. Rather than treating these subjects as separate or symbolic in isolation, the works allow them to overlap and echo one another, revealing shared anatomical rhythms, instincts and modes of presence. Faces appear within animals, eyes surface in unexpected places and bodies seem shaped by the same underlying logic, suggesting connection not as metaphor but as structure.
Symbolism runs throughout the series, drawing on visual languages that are ancient and persistent—animals as carriers of instinct, eyes as sites of perception and awareness, nests, storms, and submerged bodies as thresholds between inner and outer worlds. These symbols are not presented nostalgically, but as tools that remain relevant in contemporary ecological thinking. They function as ways of understanding relationship, vulnerability and adaptation—concerns that have accompanied human culture across time and remain urgent today.
Formally, the repetition of phenotypic features points toward ideas of convergent evolution and shared adaptive intelligence. The drawings propose that perception, resilience, and sensitivity are not uniquely human traits, but qualities shaped by environment and necessity across species. In this way, the work resists hierarchy, instead offering a vision of coexistence grounded in commonality and mutual influence.
Graphite is used for its intimacy and immediacy. Layered, worked surfaces retain evidence of touch, revision, and duration, reinforcing the sense that these images emerge through sustained attention rather than fixed intention. Together, the works invite a slower engagement—one that recognises the human figure not as separate observer, but as part of a wider, interdependent living system shaped by the same forces of form, memory and time.
Borzoi