CUSTOMER COPY - Ella Gerrard

Senior Thesis Exhibition 2025

Getting up close and personal with the absolutely normal, ridiculously ordinary, and utterly mundane, and perhaps learning a little about the way we interact with the world.

STORE 0516 TILL 5 TRANSACTION 233117.

Have you ever thought to keep a record of your life through grocery receipts? Or perhaps with parking tickets? Or maybe through saving every gum wrapper you have ever touched? We are constantly consuming the visuals around us, including the ones we barely remember. I know my brain has been rewritten by the two-column, black and white, slightly glossy texture of a receipt. Even at this moment, you can feel that strange smoothness between your fingers as your mind has solidified that sensual memory. I am strangely fascinated with these mundane record keepers. The loose change and wrappers that sit in our pockets may come to be small witnesses to our lives, just as we come to witness theirs. A mutual exchange of ordinary observation that wiggles its way into our minds.

The difficulty of art is replicating a fascination felt by the artist. My work takes my interest in these banal items and my—somewhat personified—understanding of their impact on our lives and attempts to display them to an audience in a way unachievable with words. A sensual and emotional element combines with a mysterious, hidden story, inviting exploration. I have no interest in telling you what you should take away from my pieces, but instead I challenge you to traverse through my muddled objects, thinking of your own.

I find we are not only affected by these objects, but we come to affect them. Behind the trail of information and sensation we experience is an individual who has left a ripple. The receipt I threw away will encounter many others, glimpsing their lives and leaving an uncomfortable feeling on their fingers. How will that receipt describe me?

CUSTOMER COPY.