Ella Baxter: On Artmaking and Motherhood, TikToks as Performance Art, and Her New Novel ‘Woo Woo’

Ella Baxter’s latest novel Woo Woo (Catapult, 2024) offers a hilarious, page-turning, and profound look into what it means to be an artist in the age of TikTok, surveillance, and the internet. Ella’s voice is uniquely contemporary, lending her novel a certain fast-paced quality reminiscent of scrolling social media or texting furiously back and forth with a bestie. It’s so very 2024. I picked this book up and genuinely couldn’t put it down. 

Her protagonist, Sabine, is a conceptual artist whose upcoming photo exhibition is driving her further into her own obsessions, as she navigates her dueling roles as artist, wife, and influencer. Woo Woo plunges the depths of what it means to be watched—both as a woman posting on the internet and as the victim of a mysterious and possibly violent stalker. 

Ella herself is not only a writer, but a conceptual artist as well. Through her visual art, she explores themes of death, the grotesque, the anti-naturalistic movement, and the natural world. Her talents as an artist spill generously over into her work as a writer. She lends Sabine some brilliant ideas for works of art, including a series of hyperrealistic gothic skins meant to transform their wearer into the alter ego of their choosing. Ella paints a portrait of an artist so vivid, I only wish Sabine’s art were real and I could see it in real life.

Recently, Ella and I sat down over Zoom and a seventeen-hour time difference to discuss the nature of art, voyeurism, and the process of writing this whip-smart novel.

Emma K. Burger: Sabine, your protagonist, is a visual and performance artist. How did you come up with the concepts for Sabine’s art?

Ella Baxter: That just kind of came to me. I was looking at a lot of weird self-portrait art—Juno Calypso and the Australian artists Honey Long and Prue Stent, who do a lot of photography of their bodies. The puppets just became a natural progression of that self-portraiture. I’ve also made masks a lot in my own art practice, and I’ve always been really obsessed with wearable costumes that are very close to your skin. So not really bulky things, but things that are more valley of the uncanny—just slightly left of reality. I thought it was an interesting art practice. Visually, mentally, it felt good for her to be doing that. 

EKB: Did the gothic skins come from your own artistic practice? 

EB: Mask-wearing is being completely enveloped in something else. Something humanoid on the outside. I just find it very freaky and I like it. I’m currently in talks to write the script for the film and I’m like, how are we going to make these fucking costumes? So I was looking at latex masks, and you can actually get really realistic stuff happening these days with masks. 

EKB: Wow, they’re optioning Woo Woo for film? 

EB: Yeah, in the process. I’m not allowed to say anything yet. You know how it’s embargoed for ages, but I can say that it’s being optioned and I feel like it will lend itself to that medium. 

EKB: Each chapter in the book is titled after a work of art. How did you go about choosing which piece would go with which chapter? What was that process like?

EB: I wanted to set an atmosphere for each chapter with the titles. They’re all titles of works or songs, and whatever artwork or song I picked for each chapter, I also saturated myself in while writing it, so it felt like it was imbued in the work. A lot of those songs I listened to hundreds of times while writing. It was very much a part of the process, and I had a folder on my laptop filled with images that I would click through. It’s not that I love all the works I mentioned, but they trigger some sort of emotional reaction in me. So some of the works I feel disgust for, or intrigue, or obsession, or revulsion. But I feel like the fact that they trigger anything is good fodder for writing. It marries well with the muse and channeling creative energy. I felt like this book had to be steeped in art because it’s such an art book. I felt like bringing all those artists and their works in and plotting them through the work. It just felt really right for this particular novel. I wouldn’t do it again for any other work. 

EKB: How did the process of writing this novel differ from your first?

EB: I approached writing Woo Woo as if I was making art. It was way more about sculpting it, unlike my debut, New Animal. With that, I was looking to other books and other authors for inspiration, and with Woo Woo I was just looking at art and music, a lot of sculpture. I wanted to move away from authors and literary works and get right into the world I was trying to access. So it was a different process and I preferred it much more. 

EKB: Were you making visual art at the same time, or do you separate those two processes? 

EB: I wasn’t because I had a baby. Because I had limited time to make anything, I had to choose between writing or art, so Woo Woo was combining both my loves. It was a way for me to still be obsessed with art while writing and also having a baby.

EKB: When did you have the baby in relation to writing and publishing this book?

EB: I did the first draft and sent it off and then had a baby. Then I got the edits back and the whole book changed. The first book I sold to publishers was 30,000 words. It was basically just a novella, and it was a much more condensed timeline. Much more about the protagonist being stalked and her reaction to it and her art-making. Once I had the baby and the edits came back, we made this much more complex, built-up world, and that was enjoyable. I enjoyed doing that, and it was needed for the book to make sense. 

EKB: Did you feel like having the baby and becoming a mother shaped how you went about the rewrite process? 

EB: 100% and actually, giving birth shaped it a lot because I had such a traumatic birth filled with so much blood and gore and horror that I had to put all that energy into something when I got home. A lot of fury and fear of birth fed back into Woo Woo. That’s why it got really visceral. I was breastfeeding and I was really hungry because breastfeeding makes you burn thousands of calories a day, so I was obsessed with food. And then food came into the novel, and it worked. It seemed to be in harmony.

EKB: You yourself are a visual artist as well as a writer. How did your own art practice impact Sabine’s in the book? Did you feel like your own work informed hers in any way?

EB: My inability to make work fed into the novel because I was feeling artistically stifled. Or stifled might not be the right word, but when you have a baby, the time that you have to make things, especially in those early postpartum days, really reduces. I was feeling like I needed to get all that art in me out, and I felt like it could come out in Woo Woo. I wrote a lot of it in the pandemic, too, so everything was shut down. I was so separate from the art world. There were no gallery openings, no shows to go to, so I was able to channel my earlier experiences in the art world. It felt like I was stuck at home with a baby not being able to make art, and I made this novel as a response. 

EKB: How do you feel like the art world compares with the literary world? And is there one that you fit into better or identify with more? 

EB: They’re both really difficult to penetrate. It’s unfortunate, but they’re really moneyed spaces, so if you come from a background that isn’t privileged, it can feel impossible. Especially in Australia, I find a lot of people are cosplaying as these bohemian artists or writers, but then you find out they’re actually financially backed to the hilt by their family and they don’t have to work for money so they can kind of pretend. That stuff is tricky when you’re genuinely trying to make a career from your art. I have found a place in both worlds, yet I also don’t feel like I belong to either, but I’m pretty sure most people feel that way. I’m not sure anyone really feels like they ever embody those spaces. 

EKB: You write that Sabine is “grinding harder than all the moneyed artists.” What effect do you think money has on the art that the public ultimately sees?

EB: 100%. It’s the antithesis of art-making and process. It can be so disappointing, what sells and for how much and why. There’s this snobbery, particularly in the art world, where a lot of places won’t even have prices. They veto you as the buyer just as much as you as the artist, and they do it to create this rarefied environment that everyone’s trying to get into, but it’s false. It’s ultimately really fake, and I hate that. But I feel like I’m an artist to my core, and so I feel like making art will always be a part of my life. In what capacity? I don’t know exactly. 

EKB: Did one practice come before the other for you in your life, in terms of writing vs. visual or conceptual art? 

EB: Art definitely came first. My mom is an artist. My grandparents met at art school. I’ve been surrounded by artists a lot of my life. My grandmother’s house is filled with sculptures of heads with birds and flowers, and I just feel like that’s been my life. There were always materials around too for me to work with, and I remember when she would paint, she wouldn’t set up kid paints for me. She’d let me use her good paints even when I was little, and I just remember feeling so important. For little kids, those experiences run quite deep. It made me take my own art seriously from a very young age. 

EKB: Someone calls Sabine’s art “chronically and unself-consciously online.” This book feels chronically and self-consciously online. Starting out, was it your intention to write a novel that feels very online, or did that just happen organically? 

EB: It was during the pandemic when I was very online and heavily addicted to TikTok. I was like, oh my god! TikTok is the new performance art. We’re all so disconnected and I found community through strangers. It was a very strange mental space, so I think it just fed into the work. 

Also, for writers and artists, there’s so much pressure to be online in the lead-up to releasing work. This morning I had to go live on Instagram—it feels so weird but you’ve gotta do it for the PR press stuff, and that felt like an interesting layer to art-making. The fact that you have to market yourself and be the person who makes the art. It’s just weird, even the way you have to give the backstory to your art and writing. It’s really constructed, because even though there’s obviously a backstory to everything, it’s never usually linear, and yet for marketing purposes, you have to compact it and make it learnable, almost like a sound bite, which is a weird thing to be doing.

EKB: As an artist, is it hard to summarize your work or describe its meaning when it comes to you totally organically? 

EB: I wrote Woo Woo while I was being stalked and there’s a stalker in the book, so I was writing about that experience while also bending it and making it different from my own experience. So then in a lot of PR and interviews, I’ve had to talk about having a stalker and what that’s been like. It’s really fucking weird. I leave interviews being like, that wasn’t the whole truth but it definitely wasn’t a lie. It was a bit of this truth and that truth mushed together. There’s no time to fill in the gaps and really tease out where the work originated from. It was from that stalker experience but it was also this feeling of general threat and fear that the pandemic was generating in me, as well as the horror of birth. 

I didn’t sleep for two years after my child was born because it was just impossible to sleep with a baby, so that affected the manuscript. That’s why it’s quite psychedelic. It’s hard because I mine my own traumas. I wrote four short stories about burying my placenta because I brought my placenta home from the hospital, and yet I actually haven’t buried my placenta yet. It’s still in the freezer. It’s almost like through fiction, I’m experimenting with thoughts or feelings I’m having and writing them as if they’re absolutely real, and then another version as if it’s the absolute truth, and then another. It’s this constant quest for truth in non-truth. 

EKB: TikTok plays an important role in this book, both as a surveillance tool, and as a means for creating performance art. You write that anything can become art by recording it. That livestreaming is a way of coauthoring work with the public. Do you believe that TikToks are art, simply by virtue of being recorded and shared for public consumption?

EB: Yeah, I do in a way. What I love about TikTok is these viral movements that happen. These dances that everyone piggybacks on. Action is art. Not so much the individual uploading their dance, but the fact that it creates this ripple effect. People are copying but they’re changing and copying, and I feel like that’s absolutely art. The comments are art, too. There’s this amazing camaraderie in TikTok comments sections which I really love. And there’s this new language that’s evolving that I find really funny. Someone on TikTok will comment that a video’s “diabolical,” so this word that previously was used to describe something else is now in this space. It’s repeated and now everyone else is using it. I find that really artistic. 

EKB: I find it interesting the way you talk about the way we love watching the mundanity of other people’s lives. What do you think it is that’s so compelling about peering into other people’s day-to-days?

EB: It’s the intimacy that’s there—this voyeurism. There’s this beautiful relief that comes with seeing someone else’s life mirror your own because we’re always worried that our domestic setting and experience is bland compared to others. It’s such a relief and a joy to share in those human moments. It’s just an aesthetic, soothing thing, too. I love seeing people reorganize their fridges and clean out all the compartments and stack all their strawberries and their water. I don’t keep my house like that, but I just find it so soothing. There’s this repetitive rhythm to the cleaning. It feels like I’m hanging out in my auntie’s kitchen. It’s that feeling of home, but you’re not really there.

EKB: Do you consider Sabine, your protagonist, a narcissist? If so, was that painful to write in any way? Do you think there’s something inherently narcissistic in the creative process?

EB: I don’t see her as a narcissist, although a lot of people probably would. On the eve of releasing creative work to the public to be viewed and critiqued, there’s this element of ego that needs to be involved just to weather that experience. You can almost reverse engineer it. After releasing my debut, I learned so much about what to expect for when I released Woo Woo because it was such a shock. Not even the bad criticisms. Even the good criticisms were shocking. Even just seeing it in bookstores. You see it being talked about online and it’s all just so shocking, and you almost need to galvanize yourself with a little bit of ego. But that comes with this crippling anxiety, and I was really trying to zoom in on those feelings in Sabine. You just have to be like, no this is genius, excellent work! I am committed to this. This is exactly what I want to say, and yet also be like, holy shit. What have I done? But that push and pull is in every artist and author and I really wanted to magnify it, because it’s such a trip. 

EKB: Sabine has a stalker who she dubs the Rembrandt Man. In what ways does she benefit from being stalked? On some level, it seems to feed her ego and narcissistic tendencies. 

EB: The fascinating part about Sabine being stalked is that she uses it to make more art. That’s the most interesting part of that dynamic—how her fear and fury metabolizes in her. I really didn’t want to write a book where a woman was harmed by a stalker. It wasn’t what I wanted to be thinking about at that time because I myself was being stalked. I wanted to write revenge. I wanted to write exactly how I felt, and art and art-making was transformative for where my head was. 

EKB: How does being stalked against her will differ from the oversharing she does with her followers on TikTok, who also gain access to her private life? 

EB: It’s context, right? Context and control. She’s controlling and consenting to sharing what she wants with her followers when she wants to by logging on and doing it. She’s consenting to being seen, and I feel like the horror of being stalked is that you don’t consent to being contacted or seen by that person, so there’s this barrage of being viewed all the time, which then makes you feel like you have to be conscious of that all the time. It’s awful. When she’s choosing to be seen by her people online, she enjoys it. She wants it. She invites it in a way she doesn’t invite standing at her kitchen window and seeing someone look at her. 

EKB: In the book, you write about the process of transforming into our basest, most animal selves, quite literally. In what ways do you consider such a transformation an antidote to the screens and technology that mediate so much of our everyday existence in this day and age? 

EB: We as humans are animals, and we’re feral and weird. Those parts of ourselves don’t get out as much as they could. In the past, there was more opportunity to be wild and free. They had bacchanalian festivals and people would go kind of rogue, seasonally, and it would be a more accepted collective experience for your tribe or community. Now we’re in these individual silos. We live alone, and we kind of exist online. I don’t feel like we have that choir singing, dancing to drums, experience. I do feel like those things are connected to making good art—some primal part of ourselves that we can then mine for creativity. Every day I’m trying to be less online, but it doesn’t happen. 

EKB: Are you writing now? 

EB: I want to get my third book done by March next year, but I’m not. I’m feeling a bit dry. You know how you expel into one project and then you need to fill up? I feel like I haven’t fully filled up after Woo Woo. So I’m also trying to spend time in nature and go for walks and read interesting things, and fill up while I work on it, but it doesn’t seem to work for me. It’s almost like I have to stop working to fill up or something. Like those two states can’t exist at once.

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Ella Baxter is a writer and artist from Melbourne, Australia. In her spare time she has a home business making death shrouds. More of her work can be seen at ellabaxter.com.