Ellen Bell makes sculptures, installations and 'garments' from paper, ephemera, old books and magazines, and other found materials. Her small shirts and petticoat pieces employ the rich symbolic language of fairytale and fable. She has said: ’Making shirts relates to a recurrent image in fairy tale and 19th-century literature – the sister/mother/daughter forming the male garment with which to send the male out into the world that she cannot experience’.

The inspiration for The Journeyman is the traditional tale popularised by the Brothers Grimm as The Six Swans and by Hans Christian Andersen as The Wild Swans. In the Grimm version six princely brothers are turned into swans by an evil spell and their sister Elise must restore them to human form by fashioning shirts from stinging nettles with her bare hands – remaining silent throughout her ordeal. After many adventures, the climax of the story comes when the innocent heroine is on the point of being burnt as a witch. In the nick of time six swans swoop down to rescue her. She throws the shirts over them, and they turn back into handsome princes. The youngest, however, will always have one feathered arm as the last and smallest shirt was not quite finished.