Neva Elliott: A trembling hold

A trembling hold articulates a continually negotiated relation to death, grief, and absence.

 Elliott’s practice is rooted in the need to respond to the transient, often unstable nature of existence: the finiteness of life, the chaos of the world, deep sorrows, and the desire for connection. It is a space to affirm universal experience, driven by the profoundly personal and subjective. 

She is concerned with how emotional experience is carried, displaced, and materially negotiated over time. Elliott’s work emerges from lived experiences of bereavement, including the deaths of her husband and father, which form the basis for considering broader questions of vulnerability, care, and emotional labour. 

Her sculptural and photographic work is grounded in material as residue and affect, forms through which loss is held imperfectly and indefinitely, without promise of restoration or resolution. Objects, surfaces, and images are treated as sites of feeling, asked to bear what cannot be fully articulated. In her photography, images function as another mode of holding, which might contain an essence or an answer, or perhaps only evidence that none is to be found. 

She is drawn to modest gestures and repetition, repeatedly returning to the fragile threshold between presence and absence, proposing attentiveness and care as forms of resistance to closure. Through this approach, she creates work across sculpture, photography, ceramics, textiles, text, and artefact that speak to shared human experience, recognising grief as an often unspoken common condition.