​​Photo of me and my gang (Leonard)
Hello, I'm Ella.
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I'm a poet and artist currently living in Naarm/Melbourne on the sovereign lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people. I'm interested in the materiality of language, the space of the page and book, and the reading experience.
I'm a PhD candidate in French Studies at The University of Melbourne where I am researching visual poetry and textual spatiality. My thesis is a comparative literature study of contemporary French and Australian visual poetry, focusing primarily on women practitioners of the form.
I am the author of These Are Different Waters, my debut collection of poetry and visual poetry, published by Vagabond Press in September 2023, which was shortlisted for the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest in 2021.
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Other interests include: drawing, swimming, translating, gardening, my two cats and toddler daughter
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Contact​
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ella.skilbeck.porter at gmail dot com
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These are Different Waters
Shortlisted for the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest, 2021, Australia's largest poetry prize
"Conceptual, droll and formally experimental, These Are Different Waters disposes its wide-ranging materials into an elegant two-part structure: ‘Inflatable Pool’, and the substantial visual sequence, ‘Concrete Pool’. Skilbeck-Porter dares to devise her own weird syntax of hallucinatory profusion, a through-composed ‘ink spell’ of restless, post-Steinian parataxis. Decisive and yet dreamy, its poetic bricolage, ‘a stratosphere of shifting surfaces’, resists closure and passes the baton: ‘The end of my swim, the beginning of yours’."
Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award Judges (Kate Lilley, Pam Brown & Melinda Bufton)
Some concrete pool poems and me and my other gang (London)