Ella M. Fainaru-Wada is an artist, a student, a self-described introspective detective. Born and raised in Northern California, Ella’s inquisitiveness and love of learning developed in tandem with a need to create, eventually generating passions for sustainability and self-analysis as accidental byproducts. Ella is currently based in Chicago, where she graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in 2022. 

Ella’s works are born from places of friction and curiosity: mental health, decision fatigue, addictive behaviors, and coping mechanisms, along with a desire to understand motivation, attraction, perfectionism, happiness, and habit-forming all drive her artwork, sometimes subconsciously. Despite these serious topics, humor and play have a home in her work.

Ella frequently finds herself diving into a topic and coming out somewhere else entirely.  

I make art to play, to discover, to invite humor into areas of friction, to encourage the questions we are afraid to ask. How do we avoid cyclical self-criticism? What does emotional baggage look like? Can we outsource self-trust? Vulnerability can be excruciating or impossible without a point of entry (or a leap of faith), and my work attempts to be both the jumping-off place and the cushion at the bottom.

Stigma and shame plague conversations about mental health and emotional intelligence. I use self-portraiture as a tool: By making work about my own experience, I can prompt the viewer to consider how they relate to it – free of judgment. I refuse to ask others to be vulnerable if I’m not willing to dissect myself first. Often a concept grows from an area of discomfort in my own life, and what better way to explore the often unenlightened actions that shape our mental and emotional states, than to look inward? I wear my paper mache Boulder as a costume, hiding conspicuously in a gallery or public space, offering myself up for critique right alongside (or inside) the piece. A trophy lauding my stubbornness boasts a horse’s ass in shiny gold plastic alongside a plethora of other shelved self-criticisms. Its title – Yes, This is a Cry for Help – is as much a request and a joke as it is a label. Curiosity and amusement beget conversation.

Self-sabotage, dependence on external validation, disregard for or sometimes violent denial of the things we don’t like about ourselves – these are universal, painful, uncomfortable parts of our lives that are scary and hard to talk about. By introducing humor and playfulness while wearing my heart on my sleeve, I prod viewers and participants to start those conversations.