Ella Wijt’s practice orbits around the tactile afterlife of the domestic, where objects, materials, and spaces absorb emotion, gesture, and silence. Working across sculpture, painting, and installation, she transforms the humble and the handmade into carriers of memory and myth. From weathered cloth to salvaged furniture, Wijt’s materials are steeped in time and care. They form part of what she calls a “quiet vocabulary,” a visual language that privileges attention over spectacle and presence over declaration. Through acts of stitching, stacking, carving, and collecting, she crafts intimate compositions that speak through suggestion rather than assertion.

What distinguishes Wijt’s approach is her ability to imbue the everyday with wonder. She does not romanticise the domestic, but sees it as a site of layered interiority, where tenderness, grief, ritual, and resistance are quietly negotiated. “Even though marble is hard,” she notes of a recent sculptural series, “it requires patience, softness, and listening. There is no force in the making, only a process of becoming.” In this way, her practice resists urgency and spectacle, choosing instead a tempo of care. Each object becomes a conduit for what is often left unsaid—traces of hands, inherited silences, the weight of time.

Central to her work is the long-running conceptual project BUMIDUNIA, an imagined cosmology she began developing in 2012. BUMIDUNIA exists as both a psychic terrain and a visual archive: a world of altered furniture, fictional relics, invented rituals, and household altars that blur the lines between memory and myth. This world-building positions her within a tradition of magical realism, where surreal elements are not departures from reality but deeper recognitions within it. In this framework, her works act as gentle spells, calling forth layered emotional realities through the familiarity of materials and domestic scale.

Alongside magical realism, Wijt’s practice aligns with the philosophies of the Transcendental Painting Group, whose members sought to depict inner vision, metaphysical awareness, and spiritual contemplation through abstraction. Her works may not share the palette of these artists, but they echo their search for the sublime in the seen. This orientation can be understood as “material transcendence,” a belief that physical form can give access to spiritual or emotional truths. In Wijt’s world, a carved wooden chair or a loop of red thread becomes more than an object; it becomes a threshold into something sacred, elusive, and felt.

Ultimately, Ella Wijt’s practice is one of attunement: to material, memory, ancestry, and the invisible forces that shape our lives. Her works do not demand attention, but ask for presence. In their stillness and subtlety, they offer a different kind of encounter—one that honours the slowness of becoming, the beauty of imperfection, and the spiritual potential of the everyday.