Artist: Elinor Rowlands
Elinor Rowlands is a U.K based multi-disciplinary performance maker and visual artist. Her work is founded on the contemporary interplay between sound art, experimental forms of composition, language derived from the neurodivergent lived experience and live performance, and is under-pinned by political interest and the act of “noticing”.
As a writer, performer, sound artist and painter Elinor has collaborated with artists and companies across forms of theatre, film, installation and music. She creates sound works for a range of different spaces and places from theatres to intimate podcasts and exhibition spaces.
Performance
Elinor makes phantasmagorical layered films, performances and soundscapes to engage, inspire and mesmerise audiences of all ages and experiences. She believes her Neurodivergent experience holds power and magic. Her work explores this power and sense of being through an autistic and ADHD filter. Autism exists in her work intentionally, without being overtly placed at its centre.
In 2019, Elinor founded the arts collective Magical Women, a ND-led model where autistic/ADHD women artists gather in relaxed and empowering spaces to make art. She leads to create empowering and accessible spaces that remove the risk found in neurotypical and mainstream situations. Elinor creates Sound pieces and uses video and film as modes of thinking and expression. She works across multi disciplines and many paintings come from compositions she has created and vice versa.
The Artist - sound art piece.
Painting/Art-making
Moved by childhood stories, theatre and live performance, Elinor is a storyteller who paints in rich and vivid colours from an unflinchingly feminine gaze. Each art piece has its own language and identity, telling a very different story from the next. Some are painted with rich jewelled and vivid colours, whilst others might invite you to investigate their textures and territories.
She uses her hands and she is captivated by sensory art-making involving repetitive rhythmic gestures that are both ritualistic and seeing; involving her body as both instrument and tool, engaging with its intrinsic rhythmic drum.
In her own words
About the artist as a Painter
I use an array of painting materials, textured surfaces, inks and pastels to create rich jewel like textures in all of my paintings and illustrative pieces. I prefer to create using my fingers and hands because I like to feel myself journeying across various territories and vast landscapes crafted on specialist pressed paper 100% acid free or canvases using various textured gels and pastes.
My pastels are hand rolled; paints are often free of toxic elements due to my sensory overload. My pieces reflect the quality of materials used through their extraordinary impact of rich and fierce brightness, hidden gems and delicious rich velvety colours seeping through elements that evoke the deepest emotion.
Partners
Arts Council England (2020)
Unlimited (2020)
Heart of Glass (2017)
Scratch Hub @ Battersea Arts Centre (2020).
It has been presented by
Drake Music (2020)
Live Art Development Agency (2019)
Shape Arts (2017/18)
Tate Modern (2018)
Disability Arts Online (2015-2022)
Minories Gallery Colchester (2019/20
Guerrilla Zoo (2018)
Hammersmith Lyric Theatre and Turtle Key Arts (2019)
Camden People's Theatre (2017 & 2020)
Battersea Arts Centre (2018).
Contact Me:
If you would like to work together, collaborate, enquire about a commission or you are an interested curator or gallery:
Please get in contact via the options below:
info [at] elinorrowlands.com
elinorrowlands [at] hotmail.com
@elinorrowlandsart
London, UK / Luxembourg, EU