Bio:
Ellie Garvey is an Indianapolis-based visual and literary artist. A metalsmith and fashion industry professional turned painter/illustrator, Ellie’s work is an amalgamation of historical folk traditions and themes of divinity remembered and reimagined into fine art, illustration, and design.
Ellie is a 2025-2026 Stutz SPACE Resident (Pattern, Ic, Indianapolis Foundation); she was a 2024-2025 RSA (Religion, Spirituality, and Arts) fellow (IU Herron School of Art & Design, Lilly Endowment & Herbert Simon Family Foundation). Ellie was also a 2022-2023 Creative Renewal Arts fellow (Arts Council of Indianapolis, Lilly Endowment).
Ellie has published works in permanent catalog in the LACMA Balch Art Research Library in Los Angeles, CA. She has exhibited across the country and has participated in New York’s Upstate Art Weekend. Her work can be found on Artsy, represented by Dama Gallery and has been featured on the Jumbotron billboard in Times Square, represented by HMVC Gallery, NY.
Ellie’s most exciting clients of 2026 so far include Indianapolis International Airport, The Florida Review, and Indy Arts Council. Look for picture book and fine art murals in concourse A and L4 of the parking garage at IND through summer of 2027!
Artist Statement:
My work is the adoration of traditional folk art and the annals of home colliding with the angelic realm; it’s the euphoria of a babe new born, the place we come from and the place we shall return to (often represented by “the mother”) and the speculative joy of rejoining that place. It is naked belonging and the flowering of faith inherited, invented, and inherent to this place reimagined into fine art, illustration and design.
My work is something passed down between women and children, from embroidery hoop to hand, from mirepoix (and the “holy trinity”) to paper snowflakes. It’s my favorite CorningWare cup and Grandma Daily’s hutch; it’s skin-to-skin co-regulation and that first cowl, littered with dropped stitches, that Papa wears with pride. It’s descendant of angels and scrawled on recipe cards. Somehow, it’s two sticks of butter, those harbingers of brownies, warming in the Pyrex. In essence, my work aspires to reassure the viewer, “you CAN go home again,” home to the candles of gratitude (lit for every dinner), home where the trees are called Peter, Susan, Henrietta, O’Malley, and Joe Jr., home to lick the bowl, home to your mother’s arms, home to something holy.
My picture book art reflects this feeling through pattern-rich compositions of paper and paint - a celebration of the natural world and the beauty found in my own backyard. Here, every contour of the katydid, every hoof and paw are treated as reflections of the sacred.
My fine art is a place where these same influences can take on more conceptually rigorous content, using allegory and personal narrative to disrupt theological perspectives. My emerging work, “Love & the 10,000 Things” is a collection of contemporary folk-art paintings juxtaposing botanical folk-art motifs with Renaissance-inspired mother-and-child compositions. The conceptual friction generated by these unlikely pairings is used to interrogate historical depictions of divinity and fabricate my own conceptions of spiritual inheritance.
Be it fine art, illustration, or design, my work is identified by the resonance of something familial and intimate. My hope is that, even in critical discourse, the spirit of belonging will serve as the work’s most enduring characteristic.