Ellie Richards is an artist working in sculpture and furniture, primarily in wood, paint, and found materials. She is drawn to the ordinary objects of domestic life: chairs, tables, brooms, the things we handle without thinking, and to how they shape our relationships to place, labor, and one another. She takes these familiar forms and reworks them into pieces meant to be lived with: used, leaned on, and looked at again. Play runs through the work, in the forms themselves and in a conviction that serious things are best approached with curiosity and humor.
Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum for Art in Wood and the North Carolina Museum of Art, and has been exhibited at Winterthur Museum, the Mint Museum, the Center for Craft, SOFA Chicago, and the Society of Contemporary Craft. She has held residencies and fellowships at the Center for Art in Wood, San Diego State University, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and spent three years as a resident artist at Penland School of Craft.
Teaching has been part of her practice for as long as making has; she's on the faculty at California State University, Long Beach, and Cerritos College, and has taught at craft schools across the country. She lives and works in Los Angeles, where she leads ER Studio, her design and fabrication studio, from LA Woodshop.