Ellie Rae Hunter Heel

The Floor Is Not The Floor 1-5, 2025
Cast bronze and velvet in walnut frame

The Floor Is Not The Floor 1-5, 2025
Cast bronze and velvet in walnut frame

The Floor Is Not The Floor 1-5, 2025
Cast bronze and velvet in walnut frame

The Floor Is Not The Floor 1-5, 2025
Cast bronze and velvet in walnut frame

The Floor Is Not The Floor 1-5, 2025
Cast bronze and velvet in walnut frame

The Floor Is Not The Floor 1-5, 2025
Cast bronze and velvet in walnut frame

The Floor Is Not The Floor 1-5, 2025
Cast bronze and velvet in walnut frame

Heel, installation view

Heel, installation view

Heel, installation view

Heel, installation view

Blue Harness, Blue Horizon, 2025
Pigmented aqua resin and acrylic

Red Harness, Red Horizon, 2025
Pigmented aqua resin and acrylic

Bit Rig 1 & 2, 2025
Mixed Media

Bit Rig 1 & 2, 2025
Mixed Media

Bit Rig 1 & 2, 2025
Mixed Media

Bit Rig 1 & 2, 2025
Mixed Media

Heel
Ellie Rae Hunter
August 1 – September 5, 2025

For weeks, packages arrived daily: coils of rope, worn leather, bronze tack. My guest room became a holding pen—an unofficial stable of parts ready to be handled. Like a farrier preparing to shoe a horse, Ellie Rae Hunter’s work is crafted patiently. She gathers, shapes, and molds each material with deliberation and care.

There’s a particular way a horse lifts its foot, not quickly, not casually, but as if offering. In that gesture there is tenderness, but also compliance. The work in Heel returns to this moment again and again: the pause, the lean, the interdependence between bodies. Ellie Rae Hunter renders these encounters in bronze, resin, and rope—materials in which shape, slack, and strain coexist. Her work doesn’t resolve tension; it lets you feel your way through it.

In The Floor is Not the Floor, five bronzes carved and cast from Hunter’s own photographs of farriering are nestled within velvet-lined walnut frames, venerating scenes of practical labor into something nearly devotional. Each captures a dense entanglement of limbs both horse and human. These materials are intentional choices. Bronze bears the weight of permanence, recalling the cool touch of a horseshoe, while velvet suggests the coat of an animal, a surface that remembers contact.

Throughout Heel, there is always something being fitted: the bit to the mouth, the shoe to the hoof, the body into another. On the back wall, two resin reliefs—Red Harness, Red Horizon and Blue Harness, Blue Horizon—are embedded into shallow cavities. Though set into the wall, they pull the viewer forward, into a field where perspective stretches and reins extend like phantom lines. The image both flattens and recedes, shifting between imprint and command, memory and motion.

Extending into the gallery, a taut system of bits, bridles, reins, and pulleys stretches into a provisional diagram. Some elements are drawn from gym equipment, others from equestrian tack. Together, they rig the space and subtly direct the body. Like all of Hunter’s work, it is elegant, materially precise, and alert to contradiction. There is play here, and pressure. This is not just a sculpture to observe; it is one to navigate.
Heel is a word with many edges. It names the hindmost part of the body, the command to fall in line, the downward force of a step. Hunter leans into that layered vocabulary. The work doesn’t land on one side or the other; it’s properly caught up in the tangle. It calls attention to what’s pulling and what’s being pulled, asking whether a bit in the mouth is guidance or restraint. Whether a shoe helps you walk better—or just longer.

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Ellie Rae Hunter is a visual artist based in New York. Hunter locates her work inside spaces where bodies are heavily scrutinized, exploring the ways in which societal expectations are absorbed by our bodies and impact our everyday lives and anxieties. Hunter received her MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University where she was the recipient of the VCU Graduate Thesis Grant. She has participated in residencies at Triangle (NY), Shandaken: Storm King (NY), Interstate Projects (NY), Rupert (Lithuania), and Ox-Bow (MI). Hunter has recently exhibited at Lower_Cavity (Massachusetts), Sara's (New York), Almanac Projects (Italy), Loggia (Austria), and Kunsthalle Bratislava (Slovakia).

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Phyllis Baldino, Max Guy & Ellie Rae Hunter
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Morgan Canavan, Ben Estes, Marisa Takal
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Sylvie Hayes-Wallace
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Amanda Horowitz
Bad Water, True West or Between Myself the Crickets and the Coyote
performed by Sophia Cleary and Ada Friedman
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Suzanna Zak
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★

About
Instagram

★

open by appointment

located beside
320 E. Churchwell Ave
Knoxville, Tennessee

Adrienne Herr 4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry March 14- April 5, 2025

November 22, 2024 - January 4, 2025

Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris & Bronson Smillie The Weather, or some other accident, curated by Danica PintericJuly 12 - July 29, 2024 Tiziana La Melia Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster June 7 - July 6, 2024

★ About Instagram ★open by appointment located beside320 E. Churchwell Ave Knoxville, Tennessee

Adrienne Herr
4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry

March 14- April 5, 2025

Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris & Bronson Smillie
The Weather, or some other accident, curated by Danica Pinteric
July 12 - July 29, 2024

Tiziana La Melia
Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster
June 7 - July 6, 2024

★

About
Instagram

★

open by appointment

located beside
320 E. Churchwell Ave
Knoxville, Tennessee