Ellis Monteiro’s art is an act of deep ecology, practiced not through
manifestos, but in the quiet of a studio where the clay still holds the memory
of the forest. Her connection to the Amazon isn’t thematic—it’s ontological.
She doesn’t depict the forest; she dialogues with the clay, and it’s in this
primal conversation that the pulse of the jungle reveals itself. For Ellis, art is a
respiratory system: “My breathing,” she confesses, “connects to the
breathing of animals, trees, plants, and rivers.” Her creative process isn’t
production—it’s symbiosis.
This physiological attunement is key to what she calls the “linked ancestry”
between the shaping earth and the breathing forest. Her technique, the
pinch pot, transcends craft to become a ritual of listening. The ancestral
gesture of fingers pressing and guiding clay is an act of affective
archaeology, a way of helping the clay remember its shared origin with
roots and leaves. She doesn’t impose a form; she listens to the whispers of
the material.
Ellis doesn’t copy the forest—she absorbs it. Her works aren’t “inspired by
nature,” they are inhabited by it. They are white as the silence of misty
mornings, fragile only at first glance: like the forest, they withstand time,
touch, and gaze. Within them lies the mystery of one who collects silences
and the courage of one who allows nature to complete what the human
hand began.
From this listening emerges her philosophy of the “shell,” the central
metaphor of her work. Her ceramics are delicate yet resilient skins that hold
the gesture, the imperfection, and the passage of time. In the face of the
Amazon’s urgent crises, this idea expands to a planetary scale. The Amazon
itself becomes the world’s great shell, and Ellis’s art is an exercise in
solidarity. What do her small shells hold? The answer is a blueprint for the
future: “They certainly hold the seeds of a possible future.” Her bowls and
chests transform into poetic arks, gestures of radical faith in germination.