Slit becoming silk
Oil on cotton
£1,360
About the Artist
Elpeth Vinces work is a balance that draws together emotional nuance and quiet disquiet. She creates worlds where figures move beyond traditional representations of womanhood, inhabiting shifting roles - a landscape, a monster, a sea nymph, a woman. The body is bound, contorted, and cramped, holding both tension and stillness. By layering visual symbols and gestures, I explore loss, power, and self-possession, creating space for viewers to engage with the universal challenge of identity and connection. Figures twist into shapes that feel simultaneously alive and suspended, like a breath held too long. These gestures speak to constraint and ritual, how we honour, mourn, and move through what it means to be human. Turning to the image in the mirror, she uses the mirror as a door, a portal to fold the world out on itself. Light, repetition, and dampness create lonely, still worlds. Through the intricacies of her own inner world and self-portraiture, I push at the edges of female identity, reclaiming the authorship of women’s bodies that western culture long ascribed to male genius. Making this work now serves as a reminder to her that many of the struggles faced by women today have yet to be fully resolved.
