Blue Shop Gallery presents
'Something Bigger Than You'
Ned Elliott
Gallery 2
3rd - 27th April 2025
PV Wednesday 2nd April 6-9pm
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
Gallery opening hours: Wed - Sun | 11am - 6pm
Ned Elliott (b.1995) is an artist born and raised in London. He graduated from the Royal Drawing School’s Drawing Year in 2023 having previously studied History at University of Bristol. Recent group shows include the London Art Fair, 2025, Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, 2024, Social Tapestry, Chilli Art Projects, 2024, Drawn Together, Royal Drawing School, 2024, Works on Paper 6, Blue Shop Gallery, 2024, Transparency, Bankside Gallery, 2024, A Curious Cloud, Soho Revue, 2024, RBSA Print Prize, RBSA Gallery, 2024, The Very Hours Pass Unnoticed, Warbling Collective, 2024, Best of the Drawing Year, Christie’s, 2023. Prizes include The Janie Roberts Prize for Excellence in Drawing (Royal Drawing School, 2023), and The Young Artist Award (Royal Watercolour Society, 2024). In 2023 he was awarded a residency at Rhode Island School Of Design in the USA. His work is held in the Royal Collection.
Ned Elliott is a passionate witness of the multiplicity of existence - not just the world we see and touch and are touched by every day but also the intangible feelings that come with it, blowing through our lives and bending us like a grass in the wind. Many of his works take inspiration from the natural world but take off into a world of abstraction but in all his work there is a continuum capturing the the transience of existence and the cycle of life and death.
His subject is nature, and his focus moves from the small to the cosmic. His gaze is drawn to those things which are simultaneously frail and beautiful; a moth, a feather, a flower. He depicts how different elements of existence, sentient, insentient, intersect and coexist in the world, creating pictures which grow out of the confusing and elusive beauty of life. His work is imbued with an agnostic almost animistic spirituality. Ultimately, his field of exploration is how all things – conscious, animate, inanimate - connect in the world, how we experience that and he strives to show how other beings in the world do that too.
Something Bigger Than You
The image of the moth is recurrent in this new exhibition of Ned Elliott’s work. It’s one example of a fascination with the ephemeral, fragile nature of existence that has long captivated him. In his depictions, moths, flowers, feathers, and cosmic beams take centre stage, ridding the pictureplane of anthropocentrism, and reminding the viewer of the greater architecture of the world. Drawn at huge scales, as in The Voyage over Strange Seas, these subjects and their worlds become tangible, tragic, and comprehensible.
There is a similar fresh reflection in Ned’s work with feathers. He writes: “My influence is nature, and sometimes it comes in surprising ways. For instance a pigeon feather on the road – I looked at it for a few days and eventually brought it in and started drawing it. It is so beautiful! What a subtlety it has, even with only its different grades of grey, white, and black. These are little clues to a life of not only a single creature but also a much larger world working away alongside our own.”
This direction provides the link with Ned’s larger works depicting cosmic events – like The Glutinous Mass That Declares Itself To Be The World, and Was It The Work Of Nature Or Of Art? These are imaginings of the enormous forces and transcendent architecture of the world of the Big Bang. In Where Did That Come From?, we see the crazed trail of a particle skittering through a supernova, suffused with the pastel powder puff patterns of colour that are a recurrent feature in Ned’s work. There is something deeply involving in Ned’s use of the line, whether as ribbon or wild flightpath, always going somewhere new.
In Ned’s work we are reminded of the relationship between the individual and the universal, and the relationship between the small and the cosmic. We are reminded that human perception of the world is just one perception among millions. We are reminded that, to paraphrase William Blake, if you allow yourself, you can take in all the glories of the world, simply by holding a flower in the palm of your hand.
This is not all to say that Ned’s work is not without concern for humans or human feeling and emotion. His work is an ode to appreciating beauty after death, that life can be cherished and adored once it has gone, that what you have lost never has to be forgotten, that love never dies.
The ironically-titled Nature’s Detritus brings together many of the themes – the pure enjoyment of colour and form, the appreciation of a seemingly inconsequential residue of existence, in passionate witness of the beauty of the world that surrounds us.
