Ella Rose Muse: the story: April 2014

Wednesday, 30 April 2014

Sculpture

I'm back from a very busy and productive week of shoots in the Netherlands, highlights of which included getting absolutely filthy in a metal factory in Rotterdam, balancing on windowsills in an old sugar factory in Groningen, celebrating Kings Day in orange, with candyfloss and stick-on jewels at Loveland (with beautiful model Zoi), a relaxing brunch on the beach at Den Haag, and some frolics around a huge national park (amongst other studio shoots and workshops) too.

I'll post some results soon, but in the meantime, here are some photographs of a bronze sculpture artist Andrew Freidin made of me! It's being exhibited as part of 7 new sculptures at Art in Ardington, which is part of Oxford Artweeks. The exhibition runs for a week from Sat 3rd May, and is described as 'one of the largest and most exciting exhibitions of sculpture, paintings, jewellery and other visual arts to be staged in 2014'.

Saturday, 19 April 2014

Do you want to see a slideshow?

It's been an extremely busy few weeks, with photoshoots galore and also a stint of filming (you may have seen me whinging about the 3.45am alarms and 14 hour days of standing non-stop in a corset, if you've got me as a friend on facebook). I ended up being quite featured (i.e. right next to the main actress in one of the most heart-stoppingly dramatic and heart-breakingly shocking scenes of the film (and of history, on which the film is based)) and my acting skills were substantially tested; it was a bit of a thrill! It's out in 2015 and features Helena Bonham Carter, Meryl Streep and Carey Mulligan, among others. I have a feeling it will be an incredible film. I'll make the appropriate fuss about it when it's out, I'm sure.

Some other things:

I'll soon be in Holland, and there's a place left at this workshop I'll be modelling at, hosted by the very-excellent Eric Kellerman.

I'll also soon be in France, and there's a place left at this workshop I'll be modelling at, and if you need me to sell 'France' to you in general (aahh, the locations! And check out the amazing facilities!), you need to take a long hard look at yourself. ;-)

Just explore the links to get involved!

... So, the slideshow.

It's like looking through another person's holiday album isn't it - a mixture of interesting and tiring, you want to be polite but you're falling asleep... but hopefully you'll enjoy this one. It's something I put together in September last year, showing lots of my favourite images I've been involved in up until that point in time (I submitted it for an art festival I went to, where watching each other's work like this is an absolute highlight for me, not to mention inspirational... and I won a prize for it!). I meant to show it here ages ago, so here I am catching up.

Music by the amazing British singer Natalie Duncan. (Seriously, even if you can't be bothered to look at my images, just hit the link below for an amazing soundtrack to your day.) The song is called 'Sky is Falling' and it's grippingly beautiful. All photographers whose work is featured are credited at the end, and underneath the relevant individual images you'll see floating about on my website and elsewhere.

>>> Click here!!! <<<

....Over and out, wishing everyone a joyful Easter! :-)

Sunday, 13 April 2014

Glimpses

By Alan Horten

Saturday, 12 April 2014

Traveller

A weekend update...

My week (or so) has involved such things as workshopping poetry (seriously, it's amazing how fired up and excited a group of literary-enthusiasts can become over the implications for meaning of 'the' or 'a' within a particular clause. Arguments and dark-choc-ginger biscuits galore. I seriously love this new group I'm part of!), eating dinner at the delicious 'restaurant, cafe and boating venue', 'The Folly', which I recommend for anyone visiting Oxford, walkies with Lulu, of course, and the usual other exploits... I also had a really nice wander around the Wiltshire village Lacock during a lunch break, when modelling there for a portraiture workshop. I was on the hunt for the small village bakery and came back with a new watch. Typical. (I'm still on the hunt for one to replace the beautiful watch I was given for my 21st birthday but unfortunately lost; this new one is no replacement, really, but a fun (/cheap) stand in. It's magnetic. Handmade. It has silver hearts. It's nicer than it sounds.) I also had a last minute agency job which involved a loooooong costume-fitting for an exciting production I'm going to be involved in, which I'm sure I'll tell you all about in due course.

For the image side of things, here's something by Phil Chaplin (more of his beautiful work here). How cool was this, for a location?! A step up (quite literally) from the usual 'model on train tracks' cliche you see done again and again... Thank you Phil for letting me blog this, in both mono and colour...

(Click to see properly.)

P.S. I'm so in love with Ray Lamontagne (Till the Sun Turns Black is such a beautiful album, e.g. this exquisite auditory business), and love this new, uncharacteristically upbeat summer offering. I know you don't ask for my current musical interests, but I feel compelled to share them with you, occasionally. :-)

Friday, 4 April 2014

; also, weather

...Three images taken at the light-stricken wonderwall of Dagmar Falls in New South Wales, by the lovely Brian Connor.

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Walter De La Mare, 'The Listeners'

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Natasha Khan/Bat for Lashes, 'Horse and I'

Got woken in the night,
by a mystic golden light.
My head soaked in river water.
I had been dressed in a coat of armor. They called
a horse out of the woodland.
"Take her there, through the desert shores."
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear.
You're the chosen one, there's no turning back now."

The smell of redwood giants.
The banquet for the shadows.
Horse and I, we're dancers in the dark.
Came upon the headdress.
It was gilded, dark and golden.
The children sang.
I was so afraid I took it to my head and prayed.
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."

Mark Doty, 'A Display of Mackerel'

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales’

radiant sections

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soapbubble sphere,

think sun on gasoline.

Splendor, and splendor,

and not a one in any way

distinguished from the other

—nothing about them

of individuality. Instead

they’re all exact expressions

of the one soul,

each a perfect fulfilment

of heaven’s template,

mackerel essence. As if,

after a lifetime arriving

at this enameling, the jeweler’s

made uncountable examples,

each as intricate

in its oily fabulation

as the one before

Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves

entirely in the universe

of shimmer—would you want

to be yourself only,

unduplicatable, doomed

to be lost? They’d prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,

multitudinous. Even now

they seem to be bolting

forward, heedless of stasis.

They don’t care they’re dead

and nearly frozen,

just as, presumably,

they didn’t care that they were living:

all, all for all,

the rainbowed school

and its acres of brilliant classrooms,

in which no verb is singular,

or every one is. How happy they seem,

even on ice, to be together, selfless,

which is the price of gleaming.

Kate Clanchy, 'Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell'

This is simply to inform you:

that the thickest line in the kink of my hand
smells like the feel of an old school desk,
the deep carved names worn sleek with sweat;

that beneath the spray of my expensive scent
my armpits sound a bass note strong
as the boom of a palm on a kettle drum;

that the wet flush of my fear is sharp
as the taste of an iron pipe, midwinter,
on a child's hot tongue; and that sometimes,

in a breeze, the delicate hairs on the nape
of my neck, just where you might bend
your head, might hesitate and brush your lips,

hold a scent frail and precise as a fleet
of tiny origami ships, just setting out to sea.

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