Turning Sound into Visuals – In conversation with artist Ella Skinner

Salford-based multimedia artist Ella Skinner was commissioned by Manchester Collective to create the cover art for our debut album ‘The Centre is Everywhere’. We were drawn by her bold, textured approach to painting, and the possibilities of conveying sound through a tactile medium. Here, Ella talks us through her creative process, the joy of chaos, and the importance of a city’s artistic community.

Hi Ella, tell us a little bit about your artistic practice – what mediums do you work in and what are the ideas you explore throughout?

I’m a multidisciplinary artist so I try to keep my practice free-flowing, constantly adapting the mediums I’m using. I’m mainly driven by concepts which aim to provoke feelings of viscerality within the viewer. It often starts with an idea, which could then materialise into a painting, sculpture, photograph or performance. During lockdown I’ve been exploring ideas of containment and temporality and have been really drawn to using latex, as I like the way it mimics the texture and transparency of skin. Another interesting thing about latex is how it morphs over time to take a shape and quality beyond my control.

And how do you approach painting more specifically?

Sound and movement are integral to the way I paint. I usually set up hypersensitive environments that painting ends up being the result of, rather than pre-planning a composition. For the past few months, I’ve been creating sound systems using contact microphones and distortion pedals which I connect to either brushes, canvas or structures I’ve made, and which track my movements as I’m painting. I find myself creating images through weird, manipulated sounds rather than focusing on making something look a particular way. It’s a very freeing experience and closer to the feelings I want to provoke. This process usually results in two things – an eerie noise composition and a horribly disorientating painting. I am always looking to apply paint in the most chaotic way I can; there’s a lot of throwing, flinging and smashing involved in the process. If I haven’t flooded my studio or created stains all over my walls, I know I’ve made something not really worth keeping.

Take us through the process of making the painting which features on ‘The Centre is Everywhere’ album cover. What role did the musical material play?

The cover art is based on Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Verklärte Nacht’ (Transfigured Night) which features on the album. Before I started painting, I listened to Manchester Collective’s recording of the piece – along with multiple other versions – until I felt like I was living inside of it. It’s such an intense piece, it dramatically builds up and up, and then drops to almost silence. You’re expecting chaos but are given serenity, which is such a bizarre juxtaposition. I did a series of sketches and oil pastel studies beforehand, where I drew in alignment with the music without looking at my paper and saw a lot of looping structures which endlessly rose and fell. I followed a similar process in painting the final work, so it was true to ‘Verklärte Nacht’ and the tone of ‘The Centre is Everywhere’ as a whole. As soon as I felt a section was too structured or considered, I just blasted the music for another five times until I’d got it right.

Did you try to convey a particular mood or story? And how do you go about translating sound into visual form?

I tried to convey the dramatic structure of ‘Verklärte Nacht’ within the painting, whilst using colour and a few symbols to represent the poem the piece is actually based on. The rising tension of the music, which results in a serene soundscape, works really effectively to convey the poem. It’s about a woodcutter who is told by his lover on a nighttime walk in the forest that she is having a baby by another man. Throughout the entire poem you’re thinking he’s going to kill her or leave her, but it resists the outrage we would expect, as he chooses to accept her and love her nonetheless. It’s actually a really lovely, heartwarming poem.

I didn’t want this piece to be overtly figurative or representational when conveying the lovers, so I tried to seek out their representation within the musical score. The depiction of the lovers coming together resulted in a dramatic mesh of deep red and brown splatters intertwined with the endless looping of the night, which was composed with Prussian blue and a wax base to achieve a thick texture on the canvas. The only clear symbol that indicates this is a ‘night scene’ is the luminous green crescent moon, which I wanted to depict as slicing through all of the story’s different elements – almost viewing it as a ruling agent over everything. Translating sound into visual form is something that comes fairly naturally to me. I don’t see them as separate mediums when painting, I like to get at this middle ground where the two exist together. I’d get into this meditative space where sound takes over me and the painting comes after that.

Where do you find inspiration?

I find influence mainly from noise or industrial music. I really like Pharmakon, Puce Mary and Throbbing Gristle, as collectively they sum up everything I’m trying to achieve within my visual art. I like how this music doesn’t sit with anything that can be categorised or labelled, it’s not really even ‘music’ in the traditional sense. It’s just ‘noise’, it just is. I like things that don’t fit comfortably with people, that both hide and reveal things, existing on a border between order and chaos. That’s why I’m really influenced by artists like Eva Hesse and Sarah Sitkin. I am also really lucky to be surrounded by artists I respect; I share a studio with the painter Hannah Sullivan and find her process really interesting. The way she paints is like choreography, and I’ve never seen anyone use paint the way she does. She’s definitely influenced the way I approach painting as a ‘thing’.

‘Rupture #b1’ (2020) by Ella Skinner and Hannah Sullivan

Finally, what do you love about Manchester and Salford’s artistic scenes? Any hot tips?

Manchester is unique because it’s big enough that if you want to do something completely different or out there, there’s a space or a scene to do it, yet it’s small enough that there’s a real sense of community. I honestly couldn’t achieve the work I do without the support of creatives in Manchester and Salford. I’ve always been made to feel like someone somewhere has always got your back. There’s also less of a pretentious air around the scenes here – no one cares about who you know or what your deal is, people are generally very open minded and welcoming.

When I first moved here from Wales when I was 18, I was super unconfident about myself and my art in general. But then I was accepted pretty quickly here, helped out and held up by people who I thought were way more talented than me. I was able to really grow and develop from this support. The community at Islington Mill in Salford has been such a huge safety blanket during these difficult times. Everyone there is always really interested to hear about what you’re doing and how you’re progressing. It’s nice to be surrounded by people experiencing the same things that you are, as an artist just trying to get by. In terms of the ‘scene’ more generally, I have found a lot of happiness around the work of the experimental music scene in Withington, for example, the likes of Do Your Best and bands like ALAN, Aisling Davis of Inland Taipan (who has recently moved to Ireland but has consistently supported me), and the collective I work with, SCUM, who work to support artists outside of traditional institutions.

Follow Ella’s work on Instagram