ELLA DUNN

Every day, half past ten

Sophie Gannon Gallery

04 Feb 2025 – 22 Feb 2025

There’s a particular mood to being an outsider in an unfamiliar place: surrounded by people but essentially alone.
Every day, half past ten records Ella Dunn’s experience of a tiny Portuguese village, where she undertook an artist residency in 2024. Finding herself largely without a common language, Dunn describes the need to communicate ‘in ways other than words’. Her paintings and drawings exude this sense of yearning for connection, and the slippage in understanding between strangers.
The exhibition’s title conjures Dunn’s daily routine, which began by heading to a local cafe. Sitting with a coffee and her sketchbook, she spent hours drawing the other regulars – mostly groups of women – who met there daily. She wandered the market, and the central square where groups of men gathered, buying scratch lotto tickets. In a village fabric shop she bought a piece of the raw linen that now forms the ground to her paintings.
For the first time, Dunn is exhibiting fifty drawings from which the series of paintings later developed. ‘I sometimes think my drawings get to the point more,’ she says. Made in charcoal, pastel and ink, Dunn’s drawings are born from a need to record, to document flashes of the world: figures and movement conveyed in a few sure lines.
Reflecting this urge to ‘get to the point’, the resulting paintings have a looseness and immediacy to them, and an affection for the scenes and people they portray. The compositions are often cropped unexpectedly, giving them a dreamlike quality: faces and features recede into the canvas, while swirls of patterned clothing and textured terrazzo leap out. Dunn describes this as a ‘fractured narrative’; the paintings are reminiscent of film stills, each one catching a moment just before the camera – the eye – pans to focus. Like the desire for connection, the full scene is always just beyond grasp.

– Anna Dunnill