About the commission

An exhibition commissioned by Radar, in collaboration with the Department of English (Loughborough University), in response to Weird Modernisms, a conference hosted by the Modernist Studies Association and the British Association for Modernist Studies. 

Ellen Angus conjures the everyday magical and mysterious inner worlds of women through painting and performance, a mixture of mythology, drawing, gesture, found objects and rituals. Her practice explores the intersections of myth, ecology and embodiment. Working across performance, text, and painting, the artist uses humour, storytelling, and speculative fiction to think about how we might live otherwise... in bodies and worlds that are always in flux. 

In Charles Baudelaire’s manifesto of modernity; The Painter of Modern Life (1859/60), he writes about an artistic break from the past and the importance of artists responding to their present context, “contemplating life itself” before concerning themselves “with acquiring the means of expressing life.” For Ellen Angus, this includes the ridiculous and the banal, and these are set against the monumental and sublime to create a tension – between the comic and the transcendent – which threads throughout the artist’s work. 

Surrealist artists could see new forms in everyday objects. Eileen Agar’s playful use of found objects and assemblage included a Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse, which the artist wore on television, and was made from a cork bowl that she covered with found coral, seashells, fishbone and a lobster tail. For Agar, “to play is to yield oneself to a kind of magic, and to give a lie to the inconvenient world of fact”. Similarly, through Ellen Angus’ playful sculpture Mercreatures of the Post-Anthropocene, the everyday is reenvisioned through assemblages of found objects. Wooden totems – banisters with mermaid figurines trapped in iridescent slime – weave ecological collapse with the fantasy of escape.  

Experiments with material continue in the new commission Mermaid Skin Tent. As poet, artist, and supporter of surrealism, Mina Loy, suggested, modernism had the capacity to democratise art materials – ‘'through cubism the newspaper has assumed an aesthetic quality, through Cézanne a plate has become more than something to put an apple upon”. In this spirit, Ellen Angus has enveloped a camping tent with latex scales, ornamented with nail shop sequins, to invite us into a weird, surreal realm inhabited by mermaids. The context of Holywell Park – with its brook fed by an ancient natural spring – provides a theatrical backdrop, as if the mermaids have just sloped off into the water and disappeared out of view, we can only see the traces they have left behind and hear their call. 

Conference details

Weird Modernism, 1-4 July 2026
Holywell Park Conference Centre, Loughborough University, LE11 3GR

Visit the conference website

Viewing the artwork

Ellen Angus' artwork will be accessible to members of the public for the full duration of its installation (see dates and times below). If travelling by car to visit the artwork, please use the West Park campus entrance off Ashby Road. There is a large car park opposite the conference centre but visitors must register their vehicle and pay to park. 

Wednesday 1 July, 10am - 6pm
Thursday 2 July, 9am - 6.30pm
Friday 3 July, 9am - 5pm
Saturday 4 July, 9am - 4pm

Visitor parking information

Artwork details

Mercreatures of the Post-Anthropocene 
2023 
Mixed media 
Location: Front Entrance to Holywell (left side)  

Mermaid Skin Tent 
2026 
Mixed Media 
Location: Front Entrance to Holywell (right side)  

A Lost Siren’s Call  
2024 
Audio, 4 mins 20 secs 
Location: Rear Exit to Holywell, Ground Floor Stairwell