Ed Fellows makes drawings, objects and performances that engage with and expose personal and material limitations. These limitations confront both our inability to live up to our own ideas and ideals as well as a shared existential struggle to communicate and belong.

With his line drawings, Fellows uses a precise repetitive process that records the minute human irregularities; the ink flow falters and stutters, the paper scuffs, lines overlap and the spacing between lines varies, all leaving a record of both the initial idea and the inability to live up to this ideal. What is left is an image that is the result of the making process itself.

With his objects, the desire to initiate a meaningful communication is taken over by the process of attempting to articulate that meaning. For example, in Case, pens, the very means of drawing, are cast in plaster without even leaving their pencil case. The solidified materials continuously bleed into the plaster. What happens is a form of on-going interaction between making, viewer, and materials. There is a tension between the desire to fix meaning and a situation of continuous uncertainty that invites dialogue.

With his performances the isolated performer attempts to reach through to the audience by exposing and questioning the set up that divides them. The eventual aim is a shared experience, a cup of tea, a conversation.

In all Fellows’ work we are witness to the workings of the relationship between pens, paper, objects and people. And how something else emerges as this process is happening.