Elinor Rowlands is a disabled/neurodivergent artist who uses dreamy world-building in her film and soundscapes to disseminate timely truths about invisible challenges from an unflinchingly feminine gaze.

When rendered bedbound and isolated due to sensory overload, exhaustion and chronic fatigue/vertigo, the bed becomes a thinking place, an accessible environment and a place where her conjuring of new worlds comes alive.

Using new technologies, Rowlands brings people together, creating empowering and accessible spaces to nurture her, and others’, art practice. Collaboration in these environments can transform our relationships with the very tools and materials we use day to day, awakening the experimentation, exploration and persistence usually primarily seen in artists who meet barriers on a daily basis and are forced to find other ways of being and surviving.

She says: “Using the collective unconscious can navigate a restorative connection that is not always present when tending to our art practice alone. There is a flow when we collaborate with others that never waivers.”

Rowlands’ work has been supported and presented by organisations including Arts Council England, Live Art Development Agency, Shape Arts, Unlimited, Tate Modern, Disability Arts Online, The Minories Gallery Colchester, Modern Panic (James Elphick), Camden People’s Theatre, Battersea Arts Centre, Unfamiliars (Gemma Abbott), Scratch hub @ BAC, Hammersmith Lyric Theatre and Turtle Key Arts. Abroad, platforms include SXRXVE, NYC and European Investment Bank, Luxembourg.

I Dug into the Soil and Began to Grow Things

What if cultivation might not grow from objects you create, but instead, cultivate from how the objects themselves store, keep and contain all that which you cannot bear or hold in your own person?

Emotions are drenched from yourself and rendered into the skins, corners, surfaces, spaces, fabric of the object itself.

I was stuck in a bedroom for close to 4 years.
It is a bedroom that gathers objects.
Each time I encounter or engage with these objects
I become lost in the journeys of the compositions and sounds heard from them.
Their calling and their memories fuse with my own each time I take them into my hands, encounter and engage with them.
I learn new moments, new situations, new sounds. I hear new stories.

What are objects when rendered as sound?
What do their vibrations look like?
What is held in their skins?
Their containment?
When we hold them to our ears, to our own skin?
What do they sound like?
What do they bring up for us?
What are we made to remember?
How do our memories encase themselves in objects and can objects contain these memories forever?

Through a map, I invite curiosity, through a trace, I invite trust, to render your senses in ways

where

you hear too

all that you normally

forget
cannot
dare not
won’t
mustn’t
don’t have time for
have forgotten how to.

And instead, experience, pay attention to, become aware of, be present in the act of listening to the object that cultivates long after it has been cultivated.

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