‘Gesture’ by Wendy Fransella & Ella Johnston

Gesture

By Wendy Fransella & Ella Johnston

Exhibition open 4^th – 27^th August

Level Best Gallery

“Oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful.” Frank O’Hara

Gesture brings together abstract artists Wendy Fransella and Ella Johnston in a vibrant celebration of mark making, colour and form. Contrasting bold blocks of vivid hues with sensitive layers of colour washes, the exhibition showcases the distinctive styles of both artists through original paintings and works on paper.

Wendy Fransella

Returning to Colchester from London in 1999, Wendy Fransella attended Colchester School of Art as a mature student, completing a Foundation Diploma and a BA(Hons) in Fine Art.

She has exhibited at the Hay Gallery, the Minories and Brick Lane, showing a range of abstract paintings.

In 2007, Wendy worked with the Colchester Regeneration Office at the Hythe as Lead Artist on a 172-foot heritage mural at King Edward Quay. This mural depicted the people of the Hythe past and present; she also organised a number of community art workshops as part of this project.

More recently in 2022, she organised a series of Arts Council-funded art workshops for vulnerable women, working with CARA and Out House East and continues to host art workshops in painting, printing and drawing for the local community.

Wendy’s work is gestural, abstract and expressive, working in acrylics, charcoal and ink on canvas and paper ‘to make seen the unseen’ by exploring mark making and colour.

Instagram: @wendyfransella

Ella Johnston 

Working across painting, drawing, and sculpture, Ella Johnston has exhibited throughout the country. She is a member of the 2024/2025 The Other MA Alternative Art School cohort and is undertaking Turps Banana Correspondence Course 25/27. She also trained at Chelsea College of Art and the University of Essex. Alongside her studio practice, Ella is a co-founder and Creative Director of Dunlin Press, an independent publishing and art project established in 2015.

Ella’s work explores how histories are written, erased, and rewritten. Rooted in drawing and expanded through painting, print, and sculpture, it investigates the relationship between text, gesture, and memory, where marks operate simultaneously as language and image.

Through layered paint, ink, paper, fabric, and industrial materials, Ella’s abstract works create surfaces that function as contemporary palimpsests. Recent works draw on ideas of strata and accumulation, examining how personal and collective narratives build over time, fracture, and persist. She is interested in the instability of meaning, the tension between revelation and concealment, and the residues left behind by acts of revision.

Ella’s practice is shaped by her working-class East End and Irish heritage, growing up in London during the 1980s, and a professional background in journalism and marketing. These experiences continue to inform an ongoing engagement with truth, myth-making, representation, and the construction of narrative.

Instagram: @ellajohnstonart