Artist Ellen Carey and Dunhill’s Mark Weston on Discovery, Originality and Creative Connection

Mark Weston has been Creative Director at dunhill since 2017, where – as he explains in this new video made in collaboration with Frieze – ‘quite loose conversations about ideas and principles and philosophies’ with his team led him to the work of American artist Ellen Carey. 

Carey has worked with photography for four decades, pioneering abstraction in a field typically associated with representation. Her restless experimentation has led her to engage unusual and specific technologies, such as the Polaroid 20 X 24, with which she makes her ‘Pull’ works, several of which have been reimagined as prints on duchesse satin in dunhill’s Spring Summer 2022 collection. Weston had ‘a quite immediate reaction’ to Carey’s work, he explains, which deepened as he explored her practice further, citing her concern with process, assessment and manipulation as well as her commitment to ‘taking a medium and doing something different with it.’ The video captures Mark and Ellen in conversation and peers into their respective working practices, teasing out organic resonances and parallels in their creative habits. 

But don’t call it a collaboration: Weston is emphatic in describing his work with Ellen as ‘a creative connection.’ ‘It’s not something that has to be new for the sake of it,’ he concludes, ‘it needs to have grounding, it needs to feel authentic.

The dunhill Spring Summer 2022 collection launches in early 2022.