Banner image: Elleanna in the studio. Photo by Minnie Leaver.

Latest collaboration: Elleanna was the 2025 selected resident artist for the Baltic x Shape Arts Emergent programme.

Artist statement: 

Elleanna Chapman is a communist and artist. She explores the political potential of art to catalyse class struggle, framing her call for revolution through the kitsch, cute, and pop-cultural – contrasting militancy with the fabulous and familiar. Working across media, with a particular fondness for installation, she attempts to bring the true nature of class society to the fore, delivered to the viewer via a litter of scrumptiously cute kittens or the glittering hand of a diva.

Underpinning her work, Chapman is a member of the Revolutionary Communist International. Consequently, she regularly engages with working-class histories, propaganda strategies, and current affairs. The artist asserts that her political organisation is in and of itself a social practice that both justifies and informs her work in the studio. 

Drawing from her sincere love for so-called ‘low art’, Chapman looks to disrupt class and taste hierarchies, collaging found material together with her own creations, and stealing from society’s expansive image (and pop) culture as a basis for proletarian subversion. Ultimately, the artist hopes to create a new form of agitprop that will have you looking twice – when the revolutionary is put forward vis-à-vis the fabulous and the familiar, the demand to oust capitalism altogether does not appear so outlandish, after all.

Chapman graduated with First Class Honours from The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, in 2024. She has participated in numerous group shows across the UK and was awarded the Egerton Coghill Landscape Prize, The Supporting Act Foundation Creative Bursary, and The Eaton Fund in 2022, 2023, and 2025, respectively. She has been an artist in residence at Good Eye Projects, Hypha HQ, WOMB with Bow Arts, Cambridge Artworks and Art Space, and The Koppel Project. 

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the point, however, is to change it (2025) exhibited as part of DGTL GRL at Galleria Objets, London. Photo courtesy the artist.

Lenin (Working Class Hero) (2024). Photo courtesy the artist.