Interview: Ellody Wu
Luca Curci talks with Ellody Wu during ANIMA MUNDI FESTIVAL 2019 – CONSCIOUSNESS at THE ROOM Contemporary Art Space.

Ellody is an emergent applied artist graduated December 2018 with a Master degree from California Institute of the Arts. With specialization in performance art and multi-media background, Ellody is recognized for her fluid spontaneous visual creation and its connection to momentary emotional expression. Having been utilizing ‘line’ as primary element in her visual art works, she is particularly drawn into to line by its illustrative and expressive potential. Currently in her artist career, she’s passionate about investigating how pure line works – how the relationship between lines can be an active visual force that cause the formation / deformation of recognizable shapes. She extensively experiment with the density, the length, the inclination of the curvature, the gradient of thickness and even the certainty of stroke, and how they all contribute to the decision of where the proceeding lines should go in order to organically achieving the overall creative outcome. Ellody is the first artist being granted a residency at National Taiwan Science Education Center with her production . Her recent works, focusing on exploring the inter-connected relationship between human factor and emergent technology in the construction of full body real-life sensorial experience, as well as collaborative immersive story telling an film shoot projects, have been official showcase selection in CalArts Digital Art Expo, CalArts Expo, LA International Children’s film Festival, WonderCon (Wonderful World of Comics Convention). Her inter-disciplinary production is awarded 2017 SCV Journal Technology Award. Lately she’s been working with Walt Disney Imagineering.

Luca Curci – What is art for you?
Ellody Wu – Art is something that comes upon you naturally. When it happens, it seems and actually feels easy – you know; it’s done ; you don’t have to think. What is hard is the everyday practice of preserving the art part of you so that you are in touch and prepared for what suppose to be here for you to perceive and realize to the world.

LC – What’s your background? What is the experience that has influenced your work the most?
EW – I came from live performance background, I got attracted the most to the sense of space, sounds and lights and the atmospheric elements around me. I love the everchanging feeling bring about by the nuanced and complex mix of those elements, I always feel like I am seeing those feelings playing out realtime while I know I am not.That’s how tangible the feelings are. They have become forces that motivate my hands
when I draw.

LC – Which is the role the artist plays in the society? And the contemporary art?
EW – Art is the solution of all stimuli being output into a sharable form of experience or object. Artists communicate with their art works what’s going on that’s pertinent to them in the meantime of their present. It could be their own opinion, the outcome of their reaction, or intentional messages that they form in to a piece of art. Wether it’s abstract emotions or realistic societal topics, it’s with their own expressions the subject matters’ been communicated. As a consequence a broader range of common sense can be reached beyond language, age, and race differences. Contemporary Arts are the aesthetic expressions that utilizes latest technology or inspired by temporal social issues. Through artists art practices, the experiences of a particular period of time got recorded in their art work for the coming generations to take as references for how it’s like in the era or point in time in the history that’s not of their reality.

LC – Where do you find your inspiration?
EW – I love experiences. I love sensing what naturally fill up the vacancy around us, the texture of the air, the flow of the wind, the temperature… how they change and how the change interact with each other thus I know this moment is different from the previous and the next. I like to record how I feel about the transitioning in between moments. The observations of how mother nature cycles and how life grow and thrive have been one of the greatest sources that afford me surprising inspirations with its randomness.

LC – What is the most challenging part about creating your artworks?
EW – Stay in tune to the state of self who started the work until the work’s completed. We are constantly changing, (maybe it’s just me). To me, a lot of my art works are the physicalized reaction of how I feel about what is happening, when it comes to the case the art work is in a larger scale, it might require multiple days even weeks or months to complete. To proceed with it across the span of time, it could become challenging to stay formatted and keep knowing how the work should lead to as originally intended.

LC – What do you think about the concept of this festival? In which way did it inspire you?
EW – The idea of consciousness really dragged my attention, it’s an interesting and not usually a pick for a festival theme. The idea of the universal connection between all entities alive on the planet, is what I think about a lot for my own practice. We get different senses around different living form, and in different environments. Our core self also possess the most expensive sensitivity in connection with the physical world through our body. The tangled relationship with the concept of ANIMA MUNDI promoted the thinking. I had for all creatures, the nature environment and how we share the same atmospheric particles that’s omnipresent, ever changing and yet hardly ever seen.

LC – What is the message linked to the artwork you have shown in this exhibition? How is it connected to the theme of the entire festival?
EW – As we’ve touched upon previously, to me, there’s one aspects of art that is simply the recording of natural phenomenon in a subjective interpretation. In those cases, the motor function of my muscles get consciously submitted to the control of the impulses come from my subconscious and activate by it. I would use pure line works to capture and trace the forces, then watch them transform into a subject if meaning.
The art pieces selected to be official exhibited with the festival are two of a series focus on investigating of my own experiences as the channel functioning as the platform for those natural phenomena to be perceived. In particular, the two pieces are about the relationship between body and the space they are in. Like the concept of ANIMA MUNDI touched upon, if go down to atomic level, all things are make up of similar substances with distinct mixtures of its own composition. For many times when I walk across some spaces, I get the sense that the wall maybe mutating to another form of look; in the other situations, for the body of a buoyant dancer when they spins at an extreme speed, maybe it resolves into the flow of the winds for a minute second then reform again at the further end of the stage, and that’s the secret of how dancers can move so swiftly! That’s my encountering and interpretation of what I could comprehend for the ANIMA MUNDI phenomena in the meantime.

LC – What do you think about ITSLIQUID Platform?
EW – The platform is a very unique platform that’s founded by an architect who cares about arts, design and fashion. Just like how architecture house all these artistic elements and incubates their development through out the history, the ITSLIQUID Platform also creates the interlinking web for connections to take place across disciplines and around the globe. I appreciate the Group’s passion for the Arts and Designs along with the conversations they proactively generated.

LC – What do you think about the organization of our event?
EW – There’s always a lovely relationship between art and architecture. The characteristic the event summons is special in a way that they think about not only art work itself also from the perspective of how the environment the works be in could effect audiences’ appreciation, perception and how to better enhance the presentation of the pieces. The organization is very ambitiously comprehensive for what they want to achieve with their passion. I am really impressed at the three consecutive chapters for a months long festival that happens coincidentally with The Biennale and the wide spread nationalities of the artists the event has managed to encompass. Every one member on the team that I have happen to come across along the way are very experienced. They have provided suggestions and thoughts and warmly open to discussions to make things possible.
Thank you team.

LC – Do you think ITSLIQUID GROUP can represent an opportunity for artists?
EW – As an emerging artist currently based in Los Angeles, USA, I feel deeper connected with the larger artist community in the world since the exhibition. I am very thankful for the opportunity being selected and able to take up my part, better myself for the thing I love and care.