Atelier Ellis launches our Makers programme. An annual initiative working with five renowned makers who inhabit the living arts.
In February 2026, Atelier Ellis, makers of beautiful, breathable bio-based paint, curates and hosts a new creative initiative and exhibition. The inaugural theme is What Colour is Home? Meditations & Conversations.
Cassandra Ellis, founder and colourist of Atelier Ellis, has brought together Celia Dowson, Stephanie Forrest, Isobel Napier, Nancy Nicholson and Andrea Walsh to meditate and converse on what colour says ‘this is home ’to them.
“Supporting those who feed us beauty through the living arts is as important to Atelier Ellis as the materials we use, how we work and the people who work for and with us. I want to show that what we do is about thinking and feeling and home, as much as it is about manufacturing.
As a business founder, I have been waiting to create this project since we began. Supporting beauty in the domestic realm and sharing it with our clients and friends is at the root of why we exist. Our paint and colours should always be the conduit to conversations on how we live.”
Cassandra Ellis, Founder of Atelier Ellis.
Each artist has been asked to consider how colour feeds their work and how what they make influences their notion of home and that of their clients. They have been invited to respond to this meditation with a personal conversation through their practice—documenting their thinking as well as creating specific pieces for the exhibition.
Stephanie Forrest will release a new series of work expanding her experimentation and love of blue using Japanese suminagashi indigo ink, whilst Andrea Walsh will be making a series of studies and arrangements exploring softness and our relationship to objects at home. Working with paper and wood to echo the quality of cloth, Isobel Napier studies the tension between fragility and solidity, control and chance. Glass artist, Celia Dowson celebrates glowing, morning light, reflecting on her happy childhood memories. Weaver Nancy Nicholson responds to her Great-grandmother Winifred’s painting ‘Northrigg Hill’, a painting that wraps her and her family in safety.
Following their mediations and making, the artists will join a second conversation with respected writer Alice Vincent at the launch event.
The five artist’s process and finished work will be showcased at the General Assembly Gallery, in Mayfair, London, highlighting the hand of the maker in their work and in Atelier Ellis’s colours and natural-based paint.
The exhibition will be open from 5th – 7th February 2026, with a press and client dinner, and panel discussion with Alice Vincent, on 4th February 2026.
Notes to Editors
About the artists/makers:
Celia Dowson
Celia Dowson is a London based artist working across ceramics and cast glass. Informed by movements in nature, her work reflects the colours, the changing light, and mystery of the natural world.
Within this practice, she explores the interplay between fluidity and form aligning with the transformative qualities of materials.
Here she integrates techniques across the two mediums, disrupting traditional technical approaches through the adaptation of tools and processes, often shaping the distinct qualities and movements captured within her work. The finished pieces encompass the study of colour and translucency through gradation and opacity and light. Through these qualities her work creates a contemplative space to reflect upon the rhythms of the atmosphere, and our innate connection to the objects we use and spaces we inhabit.
Stephanie Forrest
Stephanie Forrest is an artist working across drawing, painting and print. At the core of her practice is a lyrical exploration of flow, movement and metamorphosis. Preferring fluid, unpredictable media and techniques, Forrest works predominantly with ink and watercolour on handmade papers, allowing the living nature of her materials to play a part in the making process. In recent years, her ink works of ‘inner landscapes’ have been made in response to dance and choreography as well as experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood.
Forrest is also a tutor at the Royal Drawing School, where she completed The Drawing Year in 2018-19, going on to develop her painting practice at Turps Banana, London. She was awarded the ACS Drawing Prize in 2019 and has work in The Royal Collection and Government Art Collection. Her work has been exhibited across the UK, including Christie’s, Mall Galleries and Windsor Castle; her most recent solo show was held at Blue Shop Cottage, Camberwell. She has been working with artist and writer, Edmund de Waal, at his South London studio since 2011 and runs bespoke courses for Brockwood Park in West Meon, Hampshire.
Isobel Napier
Isobel Napier is a London based artist working in paper and wood. Her practice is influence by the craftmanship of textile traditions and blends precise digital design with elements of chance and incidence.
Using laser cutting and 3D milling processes, Isobel blends traditional craft techniques with modern technology, reimagining the language of textiles through different mediums. By meticulously cutting lines to mimic warp threads, she recreates the intricate patterns, threads and textures of fabric, transforming solid forms into delicate, ephemeral creations, evoking a sense of fragility and flow, she explores the balance between solidity and transience, tradition and innovation.
By placing process and materials at the forefront of her practice, she celebrates the inherent qualities and transformative possibilities of her chosen mediums. Contrasting the definitive control offered by digital modes of making, with natural materials and the heritage of traditional crafts.
Nancy Nicholson
Nancy Nicholson is a rug weaver and artist. Her work is focuses on grounding, dropping an anchor, both in her practice itself and the designs she weaves. Her practice anchors her back technically to a millennium of makers, echoing their movements in her own, binding her up in the history of the fibre she works with.
Nancy’s bold, geometric compositions stitch her to the foundations of the modern world around us, drawing on the rations between everyday objects, roof beams and walls – car wheels and curbs, her work explores how we move through spaces, how life takes place there, whilst playing with and pushing up against the fundamental grid system of the loom. Raised on a farm in Cumbria to a shepherdess in a multigenerational family of artists, Nancy is stitching that practical, earthborn world to the abstract and aesthetic – a relationship she believes is mirrored in the craft of weaving itself.
Andrea Walsh
Andrea Walsh is an artist based in East Lothian, Scotland. She studied fine art before a Master’s degree in glass and set up her studio in 2005. Andrea's work explores a range of materials including ceramics, glass and metal, to create exquisitely crafted, timeless and unique pieces. Her work is included in private and public collections worldwide, these include the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh, and she was selected as a finalist in the BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour Craft Prize 2017, and the LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize in 2019.
Notes to Editors
For all press enquiries please contact alex@atelierellis.co.uk | 020 3931 6296. Artist’s portraits are available on request. High-res images of the work will be available in early January 2026.
Address: Atelier Ellis, The Bottle Factory, 12 Ossory Road, Bermondsey, SE1 5AN.
Opening Hours: Monday-Friday, 9am – 4pm
About Atelier Ellis
Atelier Ellis makes natural, breathable, bio-based paint and colour to help people tell their story of home. Founded by Cassandra Ellis in 2018, Atelier Ellis is a human-scale business that looks for reminders of humanity in everything we do. Atelier Ellis is an independent maker of colour, formulating, making, and selling their own exceptional quality bio-based paint.
The 126 colours that make up the Atelier Ellis collection reflect a new classicism that is neither minimalist nor traditional. Embracing a simple-useful-beautiful aesthetic, the colours are deeply rooted in the natural world, as well as personal memories, marks, and fragments.
Inspired by the way we live in nature, in cities and society, the distinctive shades are designed to create quiet, joyful backdrops to people’s homes and lives, helping them tell their unique stories of home in the way they choose.
