Meet Elsie

I document autobiographical scenes while reinventing the subject matter in a deliberate return to honouring the sacredness of everyday moments. My imagery lives in a metamodernist, sentimental, and childlike world of exploration called the Land of Goose. It draws from remembered childhood moments and treats memory as mythology, turning fragmented past experiences into micro-epics. Small domestic narratives carry the weight of relics. A walk becomes an odyssey. Finding insects becomes a quest. A dog becomes a steed. The nostalgia in my work moves forward as well as back, involving my own past layered with my son's unfolding present, and the future I am hopeful for. 

Using mixed media, I build expressive, saturated scenes on thrifted and repurposed canvases. A second-hand surface carries its own history, and I paint with that memory still present, treating the surface as a simultaneous archive and invitation that aligns with the oscillation of the past, present, future, imagined, and remembered in my subject matter. Some scenes in my paintings are reminiscent of storybook pages, and the mark-making is focused on emphasising the human-made object in a world that increasingly asks us to be fast, perfect, and detached.

Ultimately, my paintings are invitations to remember and to reinvent, and to speak of what was silenced, at the same time. They ask viewers to enter a place where the ordinary becomes epic again.

I am a Specialist Wellness Counsellor, fine artist, Etsy creator, and professional fun-haver based in South Africa. I like strawberries on pizza (not Nutella pizza, like strawberries on actual cheese-tomato-pepperoni-parmesan pizza), my circus of dogs, and The Fantastic Mr Fox. I have been told I have a yellow aura. At night, I paint after not having painted in over 8 years, and by day, I own A Happy Place Counselling Centre and am an autistic woman supporting neurodivergent families. I have a degree in Fine Art (what a nightmare that was), a BSocSci Hons in Psychology, and I am a final year social work student. My biggest joys are my dogs (!!!), my son, my husband, my colourful home stocked with weird art, and learning about life alongside my autistic clients.