Ellen Macdonald (b.1983, Stirling, Scotland) previously studied at the Glasgow School of Art.

Macdonald is an artist whose work focuses on the process of mediation that occurs in painting, in order to examine and expose the relationships between objects, actions and representations. She attempts to address the narrative potential that emerges from the compression of these relationships in individual paintings and within particular groupings of the paintings. She often makes objects in the studio, with materials that are to hand, from which she later makes paintings. The malleable quality of the rudimentary materials used for these models leave the traces of their handling visible, allowing their histories to remain tangible. The resulting paintings are images that are also documents, since they simultaneously represent and also act as evidence of the activity of their own recording. Her work exists at various points on a scale between fictional and actual, objective and subjective, between recognisable and obscure.