Elli Ott

Elli Ott (1989, Rostock, Germany) is a visual artist based in Aachen. Working primarily with sculpture and installation, she explores relationships between human and other-than-human bodies, focusing on shared materialities, vulnerability and body memory. Among others, she participated in artist residencies at Salmastra in Catania, Sicily (2025), and Künstlerhaus Lukas in Ahrenshoop (2024), exhibited at Kunstverein zu Rostock (2025), was nominated for the Emerging Artist Award Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (2026), and received a one-year DAAD scholarship.

Her practice often begins at the boundaries between land and sea, where she encounters the materials and questions that shape her research. She explores the connections between bodies, landscapes and materials, investigating how they leave traces in one another and how seemingly separate forms of life share matter and histories.

Moving between personal experience and collective narratives, she combines conceptual inquiry with material experimentation. Through this interplay, she seeks to make visible the complex relationships between bodies, environments and the processes that connect them.

Under the working title beneath the pavement, the sea, Elli Ott will investigate this limestone as both geological archive and shared material. She will explore the relationship between the microscopic bodies that formed the stone, the landscapes and buildings constructed from it, and the human body, whose own skeleton is composed of related mineral matter.

During her time in Heerlen, Elli Ott will explore the regional landscape on foot and search for fossils and other, less visible traces of its marine past. At the same time, she will experiment with limestone and lime as artistic materials, working with locally sourced stone and materials connected to the regional limestone industry. Using processes of pressing, casting and imprinting, she plans to develop sculptural works that function as a material archive of the absent sea.