Elin is a Swedish-British artist working across sculpture, painting, photography, and text. Her practice begins with what is close at hand: logs, swans, fragments of landscape, and self-portraits emerge through an improvised, playful language of making.
Through these works, she reflects on beauty and pain, often attending to what is fragile, fleeting, or difficult to hold.
Guided by curiosity and quiet joy, her process is intuitive and materially led. She describes many of her works as “bodged”, improvised acts of repair that embrace imperfection while speaking to fragility, persistence, and protest.
Across her practice runs a sense of belated resistance: artworks become acts of choice, and painting offers a pause in which to imagine how things might be otherwise. What grows from loss? What comes to life through a mulching log?
Her work gives form to contradiction: delight and fear, tenderness and damage, wonder and solitude. Beneath it lies a desire for life, in all its messiness, to make some kind of sense.
In 2016, she started Jakob Kroon Gallery, a nomadic artist-run gallery. She completed a practice-based PhD at University of the Arts London in 2024, and has recently exhibited in Stockholm, London and Brighton.
http://www.elin-karlsson.co.uk/
