Ella Wijt is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, installation, and photography. Her practice explores mythology, religion, and womanhood through material and narrative forms, often drawing from personal memory, quiet rituals, and the layered intimacy of domestic space.
Selected Works
Selected Works
Domestic Emotions: A Home Within Me, installation view
ARTJOG 2023
The Edge of Neptune, 2025
Oil on canvas, teak frame embedded with brass pieces
54 × 44 cm (with frame)
Beings, 2025
Oil on canvas, teak frame embedded with acrylic pearl beads
42.5 × 32.5 cm
Elysium, 2025
Oil on canvas, teak frame embedded with brass pieces and acrylic pearl beads
41 × 48 cm
Spice, 2025
Oil on Canvas, acrylic pearl beads, brass stand
80 × 40 × 9
Manuscript Excerpt
BUMIDUNIA SERIES 2012 - Present
Manuscript Excerpt
BUMIDUNIA SERIES 2012 - Present
Manuscript Excerpt
BUMIDUNIA SERIES 2012 - Present
Food, 2012 - 2016
Hand-built ceramics objects
BUMIDUNIA SERIES
A Very Classic Circus, 2020
Pencil, thread, acrylic paint on raw canvas
20 × 100 cm
Sometimes I Treat Your Heart Better Than I Treat Mine, 2023
Acrylic paint, raw canvas, cotton thread, wood, preserved chicken bone, 14k gold wire, beads
60 × 44 × 5 cm
More Than A Feeling, a Practice, 2023
Acrylic paint, raw canvas, thread, wood, resin, dried grass, 14k gold wire, beads
72 × 56 × 5 cm
Melting My Day with My Sweat
Acrylic paint, raw canvas, thread, wood, preserved chicken bone, resin, plastic toys, dried flower, 14k gold wire
73 × 63 × 4.5 cm
Choose Your Own Adventure, 2023
Acrylic paint and plastic toys on reclaimed teak
23 pieces, dimensions variable
River Dance #2, 2023
Acrylic paint and plastic toys on reclaimed teak wood,
9 x 11 × 1 cm
Escape Route, 2023
Acrylic paint and plastic toys on reclaimed teak wood
11 x 6.5 x 1.5 cm
Exhibitions
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About
Ella Wijt
Biography
Ella Wijt is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, installation, and photography. Her practice explores mythology, religion, and womanhood through material and narrative forms, often drawing from personal memory, quiet rituals, and the layered intimacy of domestic space.
Her interest in art began at a young age through drawing and painting, and she began exhibiting publicly in 2005. Wijt holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2015), where she studied Contemporary Studies and Painting and was awarded both the Distinguished Merit Scholarship and the Edward L. Ryerson Fellowship Award.
Since 2012, her ongoing project BUMIDUNIA has served as the conceptual mothership of her practice—a fictional, evolving cosmology developed in collaboration with her environment. Through modified objects, collected materials, and invented relics, BUMIDUNIA traverses the boundaries of myth, memory, and material transformation. It also forms the foundation of her childhood dream: a living library and home for collected objects, realised as Rumah Tangga—an artist-run space and project in Depok, West Java, which she co-founded in 2018.
Her work has been exhibited across Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, and the United States, with recent highlights including The Big Spill at RUBANAH Underground, Jakarta (2022), ARTJOG Motif: Lamaran (2023), and the 15th Gwangju Biennale (2024). She has undertaken residencies at Rimbun Dahan (Malaysia), and was nominated for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in 2021.
Ella Wijt lives and works in Depok, Indonesia.
Ella Wijt in her studio in Depok, Indonesia
Photographed by Muhammad Helmi
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