Ever since her early works, such as Eat 22 (for which she photographed everything she ate for a year), there has been a blurring between Ellie Harrison’s life and work, and an ongoing struggle to balance the two. Over the last six years, as her work has become more politicised, she has developed ever more extreme systems and rules to enable her to live her values (minimise her impact on the world) and be as efficient as possible (maximise her work time) – pushing out all unnecessary objects and relationships as a result. In this talk, as part of Artquest’s Practice 360° programme, she will discuss how this rational path of continual ‘progress’ became ultimately, ironically, ‘unsustainable’, and how at a certain point she had to try to learn to compromise in order to survive.
