Notes on Being Human
Opening night: 6-8 pm Thursday 12 September
Pallas Projects/Studios, 115–117 The Coombe, Dublin 8, D08 A970
Exhibition continues: Friday 13 – Saturday 28 September
Gallery hours: 12–6 pm, Thursday–Saturday (during exhibitions)
I am pleased to present my new solo exhibition, Notes on Being Human, at Pallas Projects/Studios as the sixth instalment of their 2024 Artist-Initiated Projects programme.
Notes on Being Human brings together reparative acts of making as part of the post-bereavement healing process through the artist’s own experiences of loss. Elliott creates work based on and in her life through extrapolating action from the awareness of the fragile and contingent nature of being human. Using coping mechanisms and transparent vulnerability as the basis of making, the artist uses herself as a subject, content, and non-fictional performer in a lyrical conceptualism that blurs art and life. While working from her individual experience, she attempts to expand beyond the autobiographical to communicate aspects of a shared humanity that still hold some taboo – death, bereavement, and mental health. Individual pieces are formed through this living as material, resulting in by-products of generative activity and autonomous works across sculpture, ceramics, textiles, photography, text, performative gesture, and artefacts.
Turning emotional labour into physical labour, the body becomes an instrument, relating performatively to the object in dialogue between personal psychology and sculpture through the act of making. Making as a space for grief, the process of contemplation, meditation and mourning. Making as a claim for safety, a self-soothing and providing solace to self. Making as recollection, writing into the world that which is absent and unspoken. Making as a process of alleviating and transforming trauma into something defined and separate, of healing through displacement. Making as participating in one’s own complex emotions, confronting, investigating, understanding, and coming to terms with them. Making as a tool to function in survival. Making as living, as a way of being in the world, living as becoming form.
Making rather than presenting serves as the fulcrum for the pieces in Notes on Being Human. The ‘workings’ presented act as a report or making public from the artist’s current practice rather than representing their final state. The exhibition is an interruption of the movement in which works are created, a temporary endpoint. Rather than being presented with something static, the viewer encounters these works as they unfold, their ultimate realisation, in form and import, still to be determined. The primary audience for the work is the artist—she is providing herself the time and space to heal through making. However, she is not alone; in sharing these things, she wants to find connections with people, encourage them through honest, open narratives to feel close to their experiences and enable conversation.
“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.”—Neva Elliott.
Image:
getting out of bed, 2024 – ongoing, Donegal tweed, moving blankets, flannel, cotton thread, archival pigment prints.