Collection: Scott Elk

@scottelkartwork
scottelk.com

Contrast is central to my art practise. I am interested in the movement between light & dark, hard & soft, focused & blurry. It is essentially the capture of movement, and energy. It is also the movement of ideas transposing across mediums, from words on paper, drawings, paintings, ceramic works, printmaking, and soundscapes.

My work always has this element of celebrating the joy of the medium; thinking about the materiality of charcoal, paint, ink, clay, and sound, and playing within this space to explore what each of these mediums does best.

If I think about my chosen creative outputs as destinations, drawing is a place I pass through to reach an end point; each outcome informed by the drawing process, sketching ideas, writing words, feeling out form, imagining weight, and playing with proportions.

My work serves as a way to help understand the world around me, and my place in it by analysing personal experiences through a constant cycle of writing and drawing, and looking at the artworks I create. In this way, my work is often self-referential. I place my own work into the centre of focus, for example: I might make an observational sketch of a ceramic sculpture, or a painting from a soundscape, or a screen-print from an experience. My process produces this hall of mirrors that echos off into the distance; each concept finding its appropriate medium eventually through time, by being open to and following that creative process.

I believe that as artists, developing our ideas and visual language allows us to create our own little worlds; worlds we can escape into for comfort. In these worlds we create our own rules, logic, visual language, values, and processes. We play with recurring themes. We place things on pedestals, people, objects, ideas. We arrange these things in a hierarchy of importance. This play by exploring with constant arranging, and rearranging, helps us to realise what’s important to us, and this keeps me engaged and hungry as I move forward.