Eleanor Flack

BA Art and Design

Ascension Wellness is a curated shop installation that critically examines the visual and rhetorical language of the contemporary wellness industry. The work materialises as a fully realised retail environment: bracket shelving displaying fabricated detox juice products, large-scale supplement bottles filled with air-drying clay pills, a shopping cart, an in-store advertising screen, and a card machine. Each element has been constructed from recycled, found, and repurposed materials, including gelatine, natural dyes, reclaimed glassware, and air-drying clay, mirroring the industry’s own practice of repackaging the ordinary into the aspirational. The installation engages with the wellness industry’s central mechanism: the amplification of consumer anxieties surrounding health, ageing, and the body, and the subsequent profit derived from manufactured insecurity. Wellness culture operates through a highly aestheticised visual language: clean whites, muted tones, elevated product placement. This aesthetic simultaneously signals exclusivity and justifies inflated price points, rendering wellness aspirational and structurally inaccessible. A short parody film, displayed on-screen within the installation, extends this critique into the language of wellness advertising. Shot in a clinical white studio environment, the film adopts the aesthetic conventions of the wellness advertisement: aspiration, transformation, and the performance of wellbeing. It exposes them as constructed, hollow, and deeply commercial. Ascension Wellness does not reject aesthetics. It uses them as its critical tool.