Neva Elliott creates work based on and in her life, not just narratively or anecdotally, but through extrapolating action from the awareness of the fragile and contingent nature of being human.
Projects come from a place of transparent vulnerability, saying the hard, uncomfortable things fundamental to being human. Individual works are formed through living as material, processing recollections and psychological states into action and tangible manifestation. Utilising herself as content and medium, a non- fictional performer in a lyrical conceptualism that blurs art and life.
Elliott’s recent body of work and solo show at the Linenhall Arts Centre in 2023 focused on grief centring on the artist’s loss of her husband, Colin, to cancer. Her forthcoming 2024 solo show at PALLAS will focus on post-traumatic healing and the ‘work’ everyone must do around difficult human emotions.
While on residency at Artlinks Fort Dunree, she will be working from biographical notes from the loss of her husband, whose family hails from Donegal. Creating work from and about her healing journey through lived experience – using her practice as a personal transformative process and vice versa. With works emerging as a product and communication from this experience, across textiles, ceramics, photography, text, performative action, voice, sculpture, and drawing.
While rooted in her personal biography, she aims to expand beyond individual memoir to speak to audiences honestly about aspects of our shared humanity that still hold some taboos – death, grief, and mental health.
“I use my practice to traverse the world, my relationships and the difficulties of being human. For me, it’s a means to work through grief, somewhere to place love for those who have gone, a way back to myself. It is a survival strategy baked into the act of making; an offering to my anguish and anxiety, a petition to ease it, a prayer in reverse.”
