Elsie Green
About the work in Transept:Traverse
One important feature is Elsie’s use of traditional art media – painting, handmade sculptural forms – and her belief that this use serves to “honour” the subject. In “Cloud” her earlier use of found objects as a subject for painting is substituted with a solid handmade symbolic cloud. The subject is one of longing and loss, but also of hope. In the sublime man-made setting of Chichester Cathedral, just as the individual hopes to be lifted out of a cloddish existence, so the cloud aspires to lift itself from the earth, to the heavens.
Biography
Born in Lancashire in 1957, Elsie Green studied at Central School of Art and Design, and was awarded an MA from the University of Brighton in 2001.
Observing how inner and outer worlds collide, Elsie uses objects (real or painted) to signify the way in which the individual joins with, and is at the same time separate, from the idealised world. This is especially true for objects which are ubiquitous, overlooked, or lost, and in places – such as the natural world – which possess transcendent beauty. Whilst juxtaposing elements, Elsie resists the post-modern devaluation of meaning – she does not aim to shock - but instead seeks to imbue the wretched and insignificant “human object” with a nobility of its’ own, and seeks thereby to question just what is beautiful or worthy of respect.
