Ellen Lynch was born and raised in upstate New York, and began her career as a graphic designer in New York City. Having earned national acclaim in her field, Ellen was called to the natural world, relocating to the Teton Mountains in southeast Idaho. Stones, bones and other natural objects became her tools, and the four-legged and feathered her subjects. Today, while maintaining her ranch in the West, Ellen can be found wandering the woods in New York's Hudson Valley or the streets of Manhattan, in an ongoing search for tools, subjects, ways of seeing and sharing the world around her.

These dichotomies inform Ellen’s life. She is a master of balance within great contrast.

Growing up in a Catholic family, her artist’s eye devoured the rituals and representations of the church while her native spirit kept something quietly separate. As an adult, she chooses the path of nature over man-made religion, her reverence for the gifts of the universe infusing her daily life. Through her immersion in and continual observation of the landscape, she uses the technology and talents so finely tuned for design to pay homage to the creatures and objects she loves. In the Catholic religion, a reliquary provides the faithful with physical evidence of spiritual reality. For Ellen, elements of nature—animals, birds, flowers, stones—provide the same assurance.

As a graphic artist, working and reworking images to produce messages for clients, she has honed the visual idiom of communication to its most sophisticated form. By allowing her reverence for nature to be expressed with the same exquisite attention to detail, she honors the relics of her world