A Retrospective by Ella Spira MBE

Global Landscapes is a two-decade body of work painted entirely on location: in deserts, rainforests, the depths of the Pacific Ocean, ancient forests and sacred sites around the world. Not from a studio, not from memory, but from the ground itself. Each painting begins in a moment of observation; the process is not just creation but translation, Spira herself not the creator, but the vessel.

“Something speaks to me and I am the translator. Almost as a ribbon travelling, that decided it needs to pass through me.”

Ella Spira MBE

Each body of work is accompanied by original music composed by the artist. Together, the paintings and music bring distant places home to those who may never reach them, while giving greater visibility to landscapes and cultures too rarely represented in the art world.

Global Landscapes has been presented internationally at Dubai Opera, Raffles Singapore, Carnegie Hall, New York and the British Art Fair at Saatchi Gallery. This Retrospective presents works created across South Africa, Japan, Australia, Hawaii, Singapore, Indonesia, UAE, Albania, and Brazil.

ELLA SPIRA MBE

Ella Spira MBE is a Grammy-nominated composer, visual artist, Theatre Producer and co-founder of House of Sisters Grimm. She was honoured by His Majesty King Charles III with an MBE for services to the arts and international trade. Her multidisciplinary practice is rooted in celebrating cultures and landscapes through painting, composition, film and immersive performance.

Born and raised in Gloucester, England, she comes from a long line of artistic heritage. Both her parents are fine artists, and her mother is a landscape painter whose work has been exhibited at the Royal West of England Academy.

Drawing from her Jewish heritage as a third-generation Holocaust survivor, Spira has built her multidisciplinary practice on the conviction that the arts’ influence on society cannot be underestimated.

“Ella lives in a near-constant state of ebullient creativity. Her paintings evoke, more than depict.”

Alice Black, Founder ArtULTRA, Former Director of the Design Museum, London

THE ROOT NETWORK

Brazil

The journey opens in Brazil, where nature carries unmistakably the character of the culture and people who belong to it.

In 2015, Ella travelled deep into the Amazon rainforest for the House of Sisters Grimm dance musical Voices of the Amazon, narrated by Jeremy Irons. She composed the score alongside indigenous flautists and Olodum, the percussion group renowned for its activism against social discrimination in Brazil.

The production explored the importance of protecting the rainforest, its biodiversity and the medicinal power of its plants, while respecting and preserving the ancient knowledge of the Indigenous peoples who have lived with and understood them for generations.

The story begins with Ella and her guide, Robinson, indigenous to the Amazon, who knows the forest the way he knows home.

Robinson showed her something she hadn’t expected. Beneath the forest floor, the trees are bound by a vast network of roots, deep red, blood red, through which they pass nutrients to one another. When one tree is dying, the others send it sustenance. The forest keeps its own alive.

The team then reached the edge of logged land. Trees felled and never replaced. The network severed. Stumps standing in a clearing where the forest had once been.

“It felt like the trees were crying.”

Ella Spira MBE

Not a metaphor, but a felt experience: the energetic field of something living and breathing, suddenly gone. Silence where a network once was.

Ella went away and composed After the Fire, which featured in Voices of the Amazon. The production went on to win the Brazilian International Press Award for Best Show in 2017.

In 2022, she returned to Brazil, this time to paint the peaks of the Serra do Mar and the coastline of Ubatuba, where Atlantic Forest-covered mountains descend towards the ocean. The Tupinambá were the region’s first recorded inhabitants, when Ubatuba was known as the village of Iperoig.

Here, Ella traced rain clouds and sunlight as she responded once again to the landscape around her. The wider Serra do Mar domain encompasses UNESCO’s Atlantic Forest South-East Reserves, recognised as one of the largest and best-preserved domains of Brazilian Atlantic Forest and for its immense biodiversity.

Japan

Japan’s forests could hardly feel more different from the Amazon. The Amazon is chaotic, overlapping, urgent, its network of roots communicating beneath the forest floor.

Japan feels ordered, hierarchical, reverent. Its cultural traditions hold a profound respect for elders, for what has come before and for the wisdom carried through age. The Jōmon Sugi tree, standing deep within the forest of Yakushima, embodies that sense of time.

Ella first travelled to Japan in 2017 for the Sisters Grimm production Sakura, exploring Japanese traditional arts and rituals with Samurai Master Tetsuro Shimaguchi and collaborating with the Tokyo Philharmonic Choir.

These works span Osaka, Kyoto’s Kiyomizu-dera temple and the ancient Jōmon Sugi cedar on Yakushima Island, believed to be between 2,170 and 7,200 years old.

To reach the Jōmon Sugi, Ella walked for five hours through torrential rain, first along flat railway tracks, then steep dirt paths, boardwalks and wooden steps, the forest closing in around her as she climbed. The hike became a pilgrimage before the encounter. And then, in the forest, she arrived.

Ella stood in front of Jōmon Sugi, a Cryptomeria whose lifetime reaches deep into Japan’s prehistory. A pillar of the island. Ancient, gnarled, breathing.

“It was a humbling experience, the age of the tree seemed in keeping with the ancient traditions of Japan. I was an instance of culture and nature mirroring each other.”

Ella Spira MBE

When Ella painted it, exhausted and soaked by the rain, she used small, densely packed brushmarks to capture the wet, gnarled bark and the weight of time, working onto handmade Igarashi Kozo paper crafted in Fukui, Japan.

The trees of Yakushima do not speak loudly. They stand. They have been standing longer than almost anything we can name. And they ask, simply by existing, for a kind of attention we rarely give.

THE LANDSCAPE SPEAKS

UAE

Behind the Skyline looks beyond the glitter and lights of a country to what nature holds, and sometimes hides. Here, the landscape itself becomes the discovery.

There is a green gem in the UAE that most people have never seen. Not the skyline. Not the glass towers. A forest, ancient, quiet, rooted.

Spira arrived at the Al Ain Oasis with a vast canvas loaded onto a small buggy, with no fixed image in mind, only the intention to find something true. Her guide led her through the ancient

Prosopis cineraria / Ghaf tree, which is the national tree of the United Arab Emirates. When she found the right one, she knew immediately.

“It was perfect. Totally right.”

Ella Spira MBE

The painting that emerged has layer upon layer of depth, unlike a European forest. Every country’s natural world carries its own character, its own soul. Ella’s instinct is to find the purest and most inherent quality of a place and allow that to drive the art.

Across the UAE, each of these landscapes are accompanied by original music composed by Ella. The Grand Mosque Abu Dhabi, Sharjah Mosque and Grand Sheikh Zayed Mosque, Fujairah, belong within this landscape too, because landscape is not only botanical. It can also express what is deeply rooted within a culture.

“The people and their land become one. And that is also a testament, and a request, to do more for our land, for our environment.”

Ella Spira MBE

The Gulf Series “50 for 50” was presented at Dubai Opera during the UAE’s 50th National Day celebrations, bringing together fifty paintings created across the nation. In Daughters of the Wind Overture, a dance-musical film created for the main stage, Ella’s paintings moved in and out as a living backdrop to the story, alongside a performance by former Royal Ballet ballerina and House of Sisters Grimm co-founder Pietra Mello-Pittman MBE.

Singapore

In Singapore, Ella turned her attention to the vast cargo ships: giants of steel that quietly underpin the country’s economy, their hulls carrying what a nation depends upon, largely unseen from shore. Having painted them from above, she wanted to move closer, to understand them from within the landscape itself and capture their essence from the nearest possible perspective.

Singapore is often known for its striking skyline and fast-paced urban life, yet much of its foundation lies beyond the city. The contrast between the polished metropolis and the working life of the port became impossible to ignore.

Ella and her team boarded a small boat and headed towards the ships. Working so close to the equator meant painting in thick air, heavy with humidity, where the atmosphere itself became part of the process.

There were no preparatory sketches: the canvas was set on the bow, the oil paint brought out, and Ella responded directly to the environment around her.

What wasn’t planned was the tropical storm that arrived unexpectedly, rain falling across the canvas and umbrellas struggling against the wind.

“It became a collaboration with the rain. A collaboration with the elements.”

Ella Spira MBE

The marks left by the storm weren’t imperfections. They became part of the painting itself.

“I couldn’t recreate that. The rain recorded a part of the moment of the painting itself.”

Ella Spira MBE

The resulting work is not only about cargo ships or Singapore. It is a record of a particular place and atmosphere, a moment that could never happen in exactly the same way again.

THE DEEP END

Oceanography, Australia and Hawaii

Here, Ella’s practice moves beneath the surface, bringing together art, environmental purpose and ocean science.

Some art begins at the surface. This goes 150 feet below.

The Oceanography works grew from a conversation between Ella and her brother, Theo Spira, a physical oceanographer and PhD candidate whose research focuses on the Southern Ocean. His work sits within one of the most critical fields in climate science, mapping the systems that regulate the temperature of the entire planet. Ella listened. And then she painted.

“I want to serve oceanographers through my project, weaving their work into mine and making important research known.”

Ella Spira MBE

The science behind the art is not decoration. It is the argument. The oceans absorb more than 90% of the excess heat generated by global warming, with the Southern Ocean playing a disproportionately important role. Ella makes this invisible planetary system visible.

The eight works were painted in enamel on glass, a material that holds light differently and refracts and layers the way water does at depth. Not a conventional seascape. Not the surface. The abyss.

Painted at Little Bay Beach and Palm Beach in New South Wales, Australia, and then from fifty, 100 and 150 feet underwater in Oahu, Hawaii.

The accompanying composition, Oceanography, grew from these works as a hypnotic, transporting journey into the depths of the ocean, creating a shared language between science and art.

THE QUIET RESISTANCE

Albania

Here the journey holds a battle, one historical, the other mythological. Albania comes first.

For the works made there in October 2021, Ella used palette knives rather than brushes, depicting craggy mountain faces and thundering cascades where the paint itself seems to move.

One painting, Shala River, was gifted by the British Ambassador to Albania, Alastair King-Smith, to Prime Minister Edi Rama, marking one hundred years of UK-Albania friendship, a gesture that felt especially significant to Ella, a third-generation Holocaust survivor who believes cultural exchange can lead to greater peace and understanding.

In Albania she encountered Besa, the country’s ancient code of honour: compassion, loving-kindness, hospitality, the duty to protect those in need. It was this code, unwritten but unbroken, that moved her deeply. Albania’s history held something she found genuinely uplifting: a Muslim-majority European country in which almost all Jews within its borders were protected during the Holocaust, and where the Jewish population was larger at the end of the war than before it. A quiet, largely untold act of collective refusal. Good, holding its ground, while the rest of the continent fell. Her painting now stands as testament, soon to enter Professor Ferid Hudhri’s encyclopaedia Albanians in World Art, a small brushstroke added to a larger record of remembrance.

Indonesia

This story has its roots in Indonesia. Spira began collaborating with local artists and cultural consultants in Bali in 2017. An exploration of the Balinese philosophy of dualism through the legendary figure of Rangda.

In Balinese mythology, Rangda is not simply a villain. She is a queen and warrior, a widowed woman betrayed and exiled, who rises seeking revenge on those who banished her. Cast against Barong, the spirit of good, theirs is a battle that never resolves, good and evil locked in a contest as old as the island itself, neither ever fully winning, nor ever fully losing.

Five years later, in 2022, Spira returned to Indonesia to paint Pietra in Bogor, her close friend and House of Sisters Grimm co-founder, sitting beneath a Banyan tree in the Bogor Botanical Gardens on the island of Java, its roots wrapping around her like shelter against the sky. Sitting at the foot of that tree, Spira and Mello-Pittman both found a deep calm, one Spira described as peace reclaimed after a difficult time in her life. In 2022, it was acquired by collector Junyi Tao in Singapore.

For Spira, nature and culture are never separate. What matters is how humans hold their place within both, the same quiet negotiation between destruction and protection that runs through the myth of Barong & Rangda.

DIFFERENT SENSES

South Africa

Where two oceans meet, there are no words. Only the wind. The water. And the line where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans converge at Africa’s southernmost point: Cape Agulhas.

Ella Spira MBE sat here with her canvas and painted, responding directly to the landscape and to a profound connection with South Africa.

Her bond with the country began in 2010, working alongside Joseph Shabalala and Ladysmith Black Mambazo on INALA, the Grammy-nominated music production she co-created with Joseph Shabalala. Spira was twenty-two.

“I’ve been driven by wanting to collaborate with people and immerse myself in other cultures, with a desire to be accepted as a friend. Joseph became family to me and a piece of me went with him when he passed away”

Ella Spira MBE

Across South Africa, 38 original works were painted en plein air, from Table Mountain and Cape Agulhas to the Sterkfontein Caves and Cape Winelands, creating an evolving dialogue with the land.

At Cape Agulhas, the landscape is not simply something to document or depict, but something to respond to: a place carrying centuries of navigation, collision and convergence in its waters. The work seeks to capture and bring home the raw power of nature in a single moment.

“Her paintings are far more than depictions of landscape. They are responses to the spirit of place.”

Pietra Mello-Pittman MBE, Co-Founder, Sisters Grimm

That relationship with South Africa continues through INALA and now extends into taste. Collaborating with South African winemakers on artist-label wines. The paintings, permanently exhibited at iGOLI Bar, are brought to life in Sensory Notes, an immersive guided art and wine tasting where multiple senses come into play.

Bar Charcoal

This journey’s final landscape is the one within: an emotional landscape. Sometimes grief and emotion don’t need a name. They just need a place to go.

After going through a deeply difficult period, Spira found herself drawing in bars most evenings after long days of painting and writing, a podcast in her ears, absorbed by the low hum of rooms that asked nothing of her.

She sketched what was in front of her: glasses, bottles and the shape of light on glass.

What began almost instinctively became a private language of recovery, charcoal recording atmosphere and emotion rather than geography.

Here, landscape is no longer somewhere travelled to. It is internal: a place through which art can offer release, reflection and, ultimately, healing.