Ned Elliott’s delicate works celebrate the cosmic beauty of love, grief and death

The artist Ned Elliot definines his creative philosophy quite simply: “drawing is just my rather feeble attempt to grasp the endless unknown!”. Across his tangible practice, where he delves into the multiplicity and abstraction of everyday existence, Ned reveals the cycles of life with one foot in the stars and another foot firmly on the ground. “I depict how different elements of existence – sentient and insentient – intersect and coexist in the world,” Ned says, “creating pictures which grow out of the confusing and elusive beauty of life.” His work is complete with an agnostic, spiritual tone, translating an endless curiosity about the world.

Ned has always drawn to art, but he didn’t initially plan to pursue it seriously, rather than going to art school, he ended up studying history at Bristol. “I always kept drawing, but eventually I felt the tug towards some form of art education, somewhere I could push my work,” Ned says. This gravitation eventually led him to the Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School in 2022, which became a turning point in his practice.

A profound influence on both Ned’s life and art has been the early loss of a parent, which once shaped a darker, monochromatic and melancholy body of work. “For much of my life, I experienced a deep grief that has felt like an ever-present shadow and this was a dominant theme in my past work,” he says. More recently, however, Ned’s perspective has shifted. His feelings of grief have instead evolved into an existential outlook; one that finds joy, awe, and enduring beauty in nature and the everyday. His work celebrates the persistence of love and life, even in the face of loss. “It’s a strange phenomenon losing someone you love very much when you are very small and with a barely functioning memory,” Ned recalls. “As you grow older, you realise how strange it is to feel such an absence for someone you really can’t remember, but also love so much and forever.” He continues: “maybe it’s a feeling that people and things die, but love never dies love and lingers.”

This pursuit is mapped in Ned’s recent exhibition, Something Bigger Than You, at Blue Shop Gallery. The exhibition, in Ned’s words, “explored my fascination with the ephemeral, fragile nature of existence,” delving specifically into the realms of moths, flowers, feathers and cosmic beams. “I tend to flit around thematically and materially,” he explains, “but for this exhibition, I think I realised whilst the theme can be explored through a variety of imagery, the material would need to be reasonably consistent.”

Conceptually, Ned ties his depictions of fragility and life into the portrayal of gigantic cosmic events, in his piece, The Glutinous Mass That Declares Itself To Be The World, and Was It The Work Of Nature Or Of Art?. “These are imaginings of the enormous forces and transcendent architecture of the world of the Big Bang,” he says. “In my work, I hope to remind the viewer of the relationship between the individual and the universal.” In contrasting the delicate with the galactic, Ned highlights, on the one hand, both the isolation and poignancy of a single voice. In sum, Ned’s work pays homage to beauty after death, and shows how life can still be full of adoration once the adored have left us. “What you have lost never has to be forgotten,” Ned ends. “Love never dies.”