The Art of Becoming

Grief, Creation, and the Infinite Loop of Renewal

By Ellie Pritts

January 5^th, 2025

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to start writing this. I had no idea the last time I wrote here that I was about to enter the most critical and challenging years of my life. 2023 was uniquely punctuated by incredible achievements and devastating loss, often in rapid fire succession. It took most of 2024 to process it all. I sit here now amazed at how far I’ve come, how I somehow went through hell and back and made it here feeling more whole than ever.

I entered 2023 with big aspirations, feeling both optimistic and uncertain about what laid ahead of me. But all the momentum I had felt building up seemed to vanish as soon as the year began. I had bet big on myself succeeding financially: renting a house in Joshua Tree to spend the month of January on a self-led artist retreat, and investing thousands of dollars into IVF treatment so that my partner and I could potentially have a family some day.

The Joshua Tree retreat went almost comically wrong, setting a tone I hoped wouldn’t define the year. From arriving locked out of the house, to non-existent internet and losing power during dust storms, it was far from the creative sanctuary I’d envisioned.

The IVF clinic I was a patient at turned out to be a bit of a scam. In the end the whole process went nowhere, and I was out nearly $10k. By spring, I had run out of savings and was financing most of my life on credit, accruing significant debt with no end in sight. I found myself struggling to provide for my basic needs for the first time since dealing with homelessness as a young adult. Being back in that headspace was traumatizing for me.

Most of my days were consumed by frantic job applications, while the rest of my time was spent retreating into my art. I threw myself into creating on a massive scale, and my studio became a sanctuary from another looming storm: my relationship. The cracks that had been forming for a while were becoming impossible to ignore, and yet I couldn’t face them. My artwork became my escape while I powered through hoping for the best.

Then I finally got a big break—bitforms gallery invited me to have my debut solo exhibition with them. This was a Big Deal. As one of the world’s leading new media galleries, bitforms had been a dream gallery for me, and the opportunity felt like a milestone I’d been striving toward for years. It was also the first time I was given full creative freedom for an exhibition. I got to build my own world on a scale I had never attempted before, and I loved every second of it. I don’t think they said no to a single idea I had. I had no clue just how personal the process would become. It became a way to navigate my evolving identity and find strength in the face of extraordinary challenges.

The rhythm of triumphs shadowed by heartbreak persisted: only a week after the exhibition offer, I lost my grandfather. He was like a father to me; we bonded over boating, fishing, and our shared love of true crime novels. He taught me to face my fears head-on, to make the best of things, and to never take life too seriously. His death hit me like a tidal wave.

While this was unfolding, my grandmother was diagnosed with leukemia. Knowing she was facing that while grieving her life partner of nearly 60 years was almost unbearable. The growing lack of emotional support in my own life only amplified the weight of it all. As I worked through the enormity of my pain, my upcoming exhibition became a lifeline and a way to channel my grief and heartache into something meaningful.

I named the exhibition after one of the most significant pieces of artwork I created for it, In The Screen I Am Everything. This piece is deeply personal to me, as it represents the boldest expression of my practice and the profound impact art has had on my life. It was my first self portrait video artwork utilizing AI animation and analog video processing and an evolution of my Divine Recursions series that was such a turning point for me.

The exhibition also featured Glitch Fleurs, a series that delves into the interplay between nature and technology, creating an oscillation between the organic and the synthetic. The printed works immortalized fleeting moments from my corresponding video artworks. To me, Glitch Fleurs reflects the idea of embracing transience and finding peace amidst life’s turbulence. It felt especially poignant during a year when I was navigating so much personal upheaval.

By the time In The Screen I Am Everything opened that summer, I was feeling cautiously optimistic about my career again. The exhibition was all I had envisioned and more, and the reception was overwhelmingly positive. But what meant the most to me was seeing the impact it had on others. Knowing my work resonated so deeply and left others uplifted was magically fulfilling.

On opening night, I had a touching conversation with my stepfather, Leo. He congratulated me, telling me how happy I made him and how proud he was, encouraging me to “reach for the sky.” He said I never ceased to amaze him. It meant the world to me to hear from him that night. I didn’t know that this would be the last time we’d ever talk.

Leo’s death was sudden, and mere months after my grandfather’s. He had raised me since I was a child and played an enormous role in my life. He was often the only person I could rely on during some of my most challenging experiences as a young adult. He was a complicated man, but he took care of me in ways no one else could and was one of the few people I knew I could trust to always have my back. Losing him was my first experience with the profound loss of a parent. My grief compounded exponentially, as did my loneliness and isolation.

I needed all the care and support I could get, but by then it was devastatingly clear that I wasn’t getting it from one of the most important people in my life. I attended Leo’s funeral alone, lying to friends and family about why my partner wasn’t there out of shame. I couldn’t bring myself to tell them the truth: That I felt like I was being slowly pushed out of his life more each day. That our connection was fraying under the weight of my needs and his inability to meet them. Admitting that our love had become one-sided was simply too much to bear on top of everything else I was going through. So I ran away from it, choosing to focus on surviving the storm instead of facing the wreckage of our life together.

Amid this turmoil, a beacon of hope arrived in the form of a career-defining opportunity: the Microsoft campaign. They wanted me to star in a series of commercials, shot documentary style, where I would be playing myself as an artist in New York City. I was to create original pieces of artwork for complete strangers based on their actual cherished holiday memories. Their reactions to the artwork would be filmed live. Beyond being an artist for the campaign, I needed to be personable and coax out stories from people I'd never met, finding nuggets and details to incorporate into their custom artworks. This ended up being a deeply touching experience for me, as many people’s stories dealt with lost loved ones and I would soon be facing my first holiday season without two of my father figures.

Every day on set throughout NYC felt like a dream. It was a massive production and there was certainly a lot of pressure to get everything just right, but I never really felt stressed. It somehow felt like the most natural thing in the world to ever happen to me. It was magical, and I couldn’t be more grateful for it.

While we were shooting the Microsoft campaign, my grandmother was rushed to the ER. She’d had a heart attack, and subsequently developed sepsis and pneumonia. They said her heart was failing. Although my days on set were a dream, I cried myself to sleep each night because I was so overwhelmed by the possibility of losing her, too. And I cried thinking about how Leo and my grandpa would never get to see me on TV, and how proud I know they would have been. I missed them. My career seemed to be taking off, but my personal life remained a storm of uncertainty and loss. Balancing these extremes was one of the hardest challenges I've faced.

The campaign made its broadcast debut during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and went on to be featured in Times Square and streaming globally. For the first time, I experienced complete strangers recognizing me. Many friends and loved ones reached out when they saw me on TV, their excitement and pride in me warmed my heart during an otherwise dark holiday season for me.

Shortly after we wrapped in NYC, I was off to Europe for a whirlwind of exhibitions and meetings. While visiting London at the end of November, one of my worst fears came true: I had another debilitating “flare up” (what we now know was a stroke). It had been about five years since the last time I dealt with this and the fear of it happening again was always in the back of my mind. The timing couldn’t have been worse.

Heartbreakingly, what followed highlighted the growing rift in my relationship and forced me to confront a painful truth: I was critically unsupported. I loved my partner deeply and gave everything I could to our relationship, but his choices put my health and well-being at risk, and the toll it was taking on me was undeniable. I came to the difficult realization that I couldn’t stay with someone who didn’t respect or value me as I deserved. Our relationship had come to an end.

I spent the holidays of 2023 recovering from my stroke while moving out of our home in LA. It was a remarkably challenging time for me. My departure from LA felt like creeping out the back door of my own life. The seven years I spent there was the longest I’d lived anywhere as an adult. It was home. Yet as I left, I felt so broken that I was convinced no one would care that I was going. My hardships felt like such a burden that I left without telling most of my friends. In January I got on a plane to NYC and quietly left everything behind.

Career-wise, I hit the ground running in 2024. The Microsoft campaign was still running worldwide, and I had gotten another dream exhibition opportunity. It would be my first solo exhibition at a museum, a major milestone for me that I was immensely excited about. And it was in Germany, which meant I’d be spending a significant amount of that spring/summer overseas. I was given carte blanche to create and do whatever I wanted, all would be fully funded and supported. Physically, it was also going to be my largest exhibition to date. I had a lot of work to do. I accepted the challenge and immediately threw everything I had into it.

Otherwise, my life was pretty quiet after I left LA. I had a lot to process and grieve. My heart was more broken than I’d ever experienced in my life. I lost my faith. Years of dedication to someone who was deeply ambivalent about being with me had caused a lot of damage to my self worth. I somehow had to get myself back to a place of truly believing that I was worthy of being loved the way I knew I deserved to be. I decided to dedicate the year to dating myself and giving myself all the love I had in my heart. I reconnected with anything that had historically brought me joy: taking up singing lessons, joining a string ensemble, meditation classes, hot yoga, poetry. And making froges.

I have loved frogs since childhood, when my father would spin darkly comic bedtime tales about a frog named Cleeto who lived in the hundred acre woods. I loved those stories, and I loved spending summers in northern Wisconsin staying up late catching toads by the bucket full. As I grew up into an artist, I always enjoyed incorporating frogs into my work, even just as little easter eggs no one else would know about.

In 2021 I released my first series of frog-themed video artworks, Frogeforms, followed a few years later by a larger series of illustrations called FROGES. I loved the illustrations so much that I wanted to make them tangible. Over that dark summer of 2023, I had holed up in my studio experimenting with ways to create sculptures inspired by my illustrations. I created a series of small, colorful resin frogs that I sold out of pretty quickly. I loved making them, and I wanted to go bigger with it. I started designing my first sculpture that summer. By February 2024 I had saved enough to get the ball rolling on fabricating it.

I spent most of my spring and summer in Europe working on my exhibition, Calderúnicae at the Ludwigsburg Museum with Kunstverein Ludwigsburg. I had created a mystical refuge consisting of a massive work on canvas, a holographic video projection, acrylic prints and several large scale public art pieces. I dedicated the exhibition to the family members I had lost over the last year. In addition to losing my stepfather and grandfather, we suffered several other deaths; the loss of a child, a tragic suicide. I honored each of them in the artworks I created for the exhibition. It was very cathartic and meaningful to me.

My time in Europe that spring was a big step forward in more ways than one. As an artist, it was immeasurably important and impactful. A true blessing. On a personal level, it felt like I was finally emerging from a cave I’d been in for far too long. I was still healing, but I was ready to live again.

Traveling solo internationally was daunting at first, but I quickly fell in love with it. Being alone made me more attuned to my surroundings and more open to the people around me. I made more new friends than I had in years, and the team in Ludwigsburg became like family to me. I felt a steady network of support growing around me and was overwhelmed with gratitude.

Of course, there were lonely times when I felt the ache of not having a partner to share the magic of my life with. But I gave myself grace, embracing each day as it came and finding joy in the experience of moving forward one step at a time.

Calderúnicae was a success. I gave lectures and hosted workshops with several universities, was invited to artist residencies, and was prominently featured in the local paper. By the time the closing night in June came around, I had another major opportunity to celebrate: my first big auction.

Artwork from my 2022 series Reverse Zoology (which coincidentally also first exhibited in Germany) was being auctioned by Christie’s in a “historical digital art collection featuring top generative and AI artists working in this space today”. The lot ended up fetching over £200,000 at Christie’s Post-War to Present auction that summer. I couldn’t believe it. I treated myself to an impromptu trip to Iceland, which I had been dreaming of visiting for years. I fell in love with it. I knew that I must return soon, and I’d love to exhibit there.

I had been largely itinerant for 6 months by the time I returned from Iceland in June. My dream was to settle down back in NYC or Lisbon, Portugal, but my health issues were weighing on me heavily. I was on several waitlists at the nation’s top hospitals just waiting to see who could see me first. When a surprise appointment opened up with the Chief of Neuromuscular Disease at Northwestern, I decided it was worth me staying in my hometown of Chicago until I finally got answers about what was going on with my health. My family and best friend being there were a huge plus too, and I finally had a solid support network in the city I lived in.

My care team leading up to this was fractured in their opinions about what was causing my issues. They had identified a variant of uncertain significance in a gene associated with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, but it didn’t explain the transient nature of my stroke-like episodes or their close correlation with unexplained fevers and inflammation. No one could piece together the full picture of what was happening to me.

When I began care at Northwestern, they quickly set about having me undergo a battery of invasive and painful tests. Many of these I had already done, but the results were so puzzling that each neurologist insisted on redoing them. In 2024 alone, I had half a dozen nerve conduction studies and EMGs, each one more excruciating than the last. It was traumatizing and exhausting, but this time I had people who cared about me to lean on. My mom and best friend braved being by my side through these “torture tests,” their support helping me endure it all.

Ultimately, none of these tests would be the smoking gun that led to my diagnosis. In late August I was admitted to Northwestern for a suspected stroke. My rheumatologist ordered a new round of genetic testing, and within weeks we had our answer: Deficiency of Adenosine Deaminase 2, or DADA2. It's a very rare genetic disorder that causes a range of problems including recurrent fever, vasculitis, strokes/TIAs, and neuropathy.

DADA2 was definitely not on anyone's radar, which isn’t surprising given that only a few hundred people have been diagnosed with it so far. Discovering that I’d been having strokes and TIAs was frightening, but it also confirmed some puzzling symptoms I had long noticed. After over a decade of medical mayhem, I finally had answers, and that alone feels like a miracle to me.

Even better, there are treatment options. For years, every doctor I saw insisted that whatever was happening to me wasn’t treatable. I’m so glad they were wrong.

By the end of the summer I had finally completed my first sculpture, Froge. Finally seeing him fully completed in my new home brought me to tears. He was the culmination of all I had been through; a shining beacon of resilience and hope. Every time I saw him, my heart would fill with delight, no matter what I was going through. I was overjoyed when bitforms gallery asked to bring Froge down to Miami for Untitled Art Fair in December. I couldn’t wait to share him with the world.

In the fall, I was honored to be part of two more museum exhibitions: Expanding Horizons at the Kunstmuseum St.Gallen in Switzerland and In Medias Res at the Torrance Art Museum in California. I returned to LA for the first time to attend the opening of In Medias Res. Naturally, I felt a bit nervous about what being back would be like for me, but I was also excited—to reconnect with friends, to explore the city again, and for my photoshoot with the incredible Lissyelle Laricchia.

Being back in LA felt surreal, almost as if it had become an extension of Chicago in my mind. Two home towns. To my surprise, I was quite happy to be there, even wondering if I might end up returning someday. The exhibition itself was fantastic and well-received, earning glowing write-ups in the LA Times and Hyperallergic.

Before I knew it, December had arrived, and it was time to head to Miami to exhibit Froge at Untitled Art. It was an undeniable hit, judging by the number of selfies I saw people taking with him. He seemed to bring pure joy to everyone who encountered him. Watching people’s faces light up when they saw Froge brought me immeasurable happiness. I consider this sculpture my most significant artwork to date and the beginning of an exciting new chapter in my life.

There are more Froges in the works, and I was over the moon when one found a home with a collector that week. Ending 2024 with my biggest primary art sale to date felt absolutely incredible and left me filled with hope for what lies ahead.

As I step into 2025, I carry with me an unparalleled depth of gratitude for where I am and everything it took to get here. These last two years were a constant push and pull; highs that lifted me, lows that tested me, and moments that demanded resilience I didn’t know I had. Through it all, I’m immensely proud of the hard work I’ve done, both in my healing and as an artist. My journey continues, shaped by the lessons of navigating joy and sorrow side by side, and with it comes a renewed sense of possibility. The future feels wide open, and I can’t wait to share what I have in store with the world…