by Neva Elliott
Exhibition Launch | Saturday 21 January | 2:00pm
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How to create a fallstreak is a body of work around grief and healing by Irish artist Neva Elliott. The work centres on the artist’s loss of her husband, Colin, to cancer.
While focused on her own experience, the work attempts to expand the autobiographical, going beyond memoir to communicate shared human experiences that still hold some taboo – death, bereavement, and mental health.
How to create a fallstreak comes in the aftermath, using coping mechanisms and transparent vulnerability as the basis of making work. In a lyrical conceptualism that blurs art and life, Elliott links visual form with emotional occurrence across photography, text, object, video, sound, and performative gesture. Through this work, she exposes her attempt to create a proverbial gap in the clouds by re-engaging with life and dealing with her loss.
“I use my practice to traverse the world, my relationships and the difficulties of being human. For me, it is 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.”
– Neva Elliott
Neva Elliott is a contemporary artist based in Dublin with an MA from Central Saint Martin’s, London. She has exhibited in Ireland and internationally, including at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow, National Gallery of Ireland and The South African National Gallery. She has curated, spoken and written on art practice. After ten years as CEO of Crash Ensemble, Ireland’s leading contemporary music group, Elliott returned to her art practice in 2021. In 2022 she was made an Irish Hospice Foundation signature artist.
With thanks to the Arts Council and Carlow County Council for funding support.