Elise Else
Memory FoamThe Sculpture
The Drawings
About the Artist
History of the Site

Elise Else is a London-based artist, working across two and three dimensions. Her practice examines the everyday matter of our lives: the objects, image-references and memory associations that comprise our material world, questioning the personal and collective meanings we assign to them. 

Through a process of reconfiguration, Elise renders this familiar language strange and unsettling, probing subjective perception and imagination, as well as the complex topography of the body. Refigured forms, manipulated materials and shifting dimensions conjure elusive interior worlds, where meaning is unstable and space is both dreamlike and transient. In their ambiguity, her works evoke the matter of everything: the plastic curve of an air conditioning vent; the concave impression of a fossilised form; myriad anatomical cross-sections. Yet their language is complicated by manipulated materials and obfuscated shapes. Both subject matter and materiality avoid fixity. The delicacy of her materials also contradict their precise rendering. Her sculptures drip with plaster and paint spills, sharpened by machined precision, brittle foams are compromised into impossible formats, plaster veneers are egg shell thin over hollow voids. Her drawings and paintings, magnifying this strange sculptural space, slip nervously between two and three dimensions. Her aim is to challenge and disrupt, flipping familiar notions of our material world upside down, to trigger surprise, unease or uncertainty, emotions that make us fundamentally human.

Elise studied at Chelsea School of Art and works from her studio in South East London. Her practice has sought to connect with large public audiences, utilising the powerful scale and context of public space to engage and challenge. This ambition to diversify the viewership of contemporary art has led to an ongoing chronology of artworks in public spaces, through self-initiated projects and with the continued support of a range of large organisations and institutions that have helped to expand its reach to wider audiences. 

She has received many international commissions, from institutions including the Wellcome Trust, media organisations such as The New York Times, Vice, and The Wall Street Journal, to global companies including Sony, Virgin and Microsoft.

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eliseelse.com
@elise.artist Hypha Curates