Pallas Projects - Neva Elliott—Notes on Being Human

Neva Elliott—Notes on Being Human

Exhibition continues: Friday 13th September - Saturday 28th September
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Pallas Projects/Studios are pleased to present Neva Elliott—Notes on Being Human, the sixth exhibition of our 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.

Join artist Neva Elliott at the gallery for tours and discussion of her exhibition Notes on Being Human as part
of the Artist-Initiated Projects 2024.

Biography:
Neva Elliott is an artist and writer based in Dublin with an MA from Central Saint Martin’s, London. She has exhibited throughout Ireland and internationally, including at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin,
the VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow and the National Galleries of Ireland and South Africa. After a decade as CEO of Crash Ensemble, Ireland’s leading contemporary music group, Elliott returned to her art practice full-time in 2021. Highlights from 2023 include her solo exhibition, How to create a fallstreak, at the Linenhall Arts Centre, being an invited artist at the 193rd RHA Annual Exhibition and showing at VISUAL’s Artworks 2023 - Remembering The Future, where she secured an award for ‘outstanding work’. Her writing has been commissioned by Highlanes Gallery, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, The Luan Gallery, the South Tipperary Art Centre, VISUAL Carlow, RTÉ Culture Online and published by Banshee, Unapologetic Magazine, Visual Artists Newsheet, and Source Photographic Review, earning runner-up in their New Writing Prize for 2023. Looking ahead, her work will feature in Out of the Strong, Came Forth Sweetness, the exhibition by Gay Health Network, curated by Brian Teeling and Aisling Clark in December 2024, and a two-person show at The Courthouse Gallery in 2025. Elliott is an Irish Hospice Foundation signature artist and Artlinks Fort Dunree’s 2024 artist-in-residence. Her work has been supported by Carlow County Council and The Arts Council.

Artist-Initiated Projects at Pallas Projects/Studios is an open-submission, annual gallery programme of 8 x 3-week exhibitions taking place from March-November 2024. This unique programme of funded, artist-initiated projects selected via open call is highly accessible to artists, with a focus on early career, emerging artists and recent graduates.

Projects are supplemented with artist's talks, texts, workshops or performances, and gallery visits by colleges and local schools. Pallas Projects/Studios is funded by The Arts Council.

1ID: Dark pink background. Read on the centre: Neva Elliott. Dark pink font highlighted in black. Read small on the bottom: 12th - 28th September. Black font.

2ID: Detail of Yù by Neva Elliott. Ceramic (Anthracite black clay), glaze, rope. With thanks to Arlinks Fort Dunree.