Elinor Rowlands is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist working across movement, photography, video-audio, painting, dance, somatics, immersive technologies, and land-based ecologies. Their practice foregrounds the crip body as a site of knowledge and expression, exploring darkness as sanctuary, suppressed memories, dissociation, and alternative modes of being. Through rhythmic gestures, layered sound, and sculptural audio, Elinor creates dreamy, surreal worlds that blur ritual, narrative, and sensory experience.
Their work engages queer temporalities and the erotic and sexual selves, articulating desire through neurodivergent, disabled, and gender-expansive perspectives. Elinor develops walking-based tarot experiences that combine movement, ritual, land-based exploration, and immersive tech, guiding participants through layered sensory and environmental encounters.
They co-research the autistic sensorium, examining how stimming, collective sensory processing, and embodied neurodivergent practices generate new artistic and ecological knowledge. This research informs both creative work and pedagogy, ensuring inclusion, accessibility, and authenticity.
Elinor is a Fine Art practice-based PhD candidate at Nottingham Trent University (ARC), investigating stimming as an artistic methodology through autoethnographic-fictional practice. Their work centres intersectional and under-represented perspectives, producing immersive experiences that are viscerally felt, intellectually engaging, and poetically resonant, inviting participants to inhabit alternative temporalities, sensory worlds, and queer, embodied forms of knowledge.
Rowlands lives and works in London, creating live art, sound trails, stim-scapes, sound art, paintings, video-audio installations, and other immersive experiences that explore themes of collectivity, ritual, and participation.
Collaboration is central to her /their practice, as she often works with others to develop gothic languages, folk histories, and temporary community constructs.
Her artistic work is shaped by a sense of "otherness," viewed through the lenses of ritual, magic, and sensory perception. She creates by dreamy world-building and always in collaboration with nature. Drawing from her lived experiences of autism, ADHD, and synesthesia, she employs repetitive and rhythmic gestures to explore texture, voice, recorded media, and live performance.
Rowlands’ music and sound art have appeared on vinyl and CD, including collaborations with Ben McElroy, as well as on NMC Recordings’ Letting the Light In (Disabled Composers).
In recent years, she has developed major projects such as Fragments of Perception: An Autistic Odyssey (Immersive Arts) and Retelling of the Wild Woods (DYCP), moving from smaller works into large multiscreen installations while learning alongside Nottingham Contemporary’s Jim Brouwer. Twelve of her paintings and pastel drawings were exhibited with BEAF & Co. in Bournemouth and in Poland, supported by the British Council.
A Disabled and Neurodivergent artist, she has received support from Arts Council England, Unlimited, LADA, Tate Modern, Shape, The Supporting Act Foundation, and many others. Her installations layer sound around repeated images from nature, producing immersive, phantasmagorical environments, at once secretive and revealing and both ancient and at the same time intensely contemporary, that critics have compared to the psychological landscapes of Leonora Carrington.
Her work has been shown, commissioned, or supported by the Canal and River Trust, BEAF & Co. (Boscombe), The Free Space Project, Drake Music Scotland, Guerrilla Zoo, Hammersmith Lyric Theatre, Camden People’s Theatre, Disability Arts Online, and the European Investment Bank in Luxembourg, among others.
