eLm
They/Them
Barnardsville, NC, USA
“elliot (eLm) is a queer artist based in the Blue Ridge Mountains, working across fiber, sculpture, and adornment. Their practice is rooted in the relationship between material, memory, ritual, and the body. Working with reclaimed textiles, metal, cast forms, and natural elements, elliot creates objects that function as vessels for tenderness, grief, repair, and becoming. elliot’s current work returns to the heart and hands as sites of creative agency. Across sculpture and textile, they explore how personal ritual can become an offering, a threshold, and a way of restoring connection to self, community, and the living world.”
“I begin by listening. I make objects that hold memory, devotion, and transformation. Through lost-wax casting, textiles, adornment, and natural materials, I return again and again to the body as a site of knowledge and healing. My work is an offering, a collaboration between my hands, the materials, and the spirit moving through them. I am interested in art objects as tools to help us remember our pulse, our capacity to create, and our right to be held. Making is how I practice returning to my heart and hands.”
@elliotmoonstone
How does your work relate to the theme of restoration?
“Restoration is the active rebuilding of relationship with the body, with desire, with creative practice, with chosen family, and with becoming and dreaming the world into being. The work asks what it means to place a heart back into the hands. to let tenderness be strong, to let adornment become ritual, and to allow making to be a form of resistance to numbness and disconnection.
Return to the Heart is about restoration as a return to creative life force. I made the bronze heart through the lost-wax casting process as I was finding my way back to my heart and hands as a maker. An offering, shaped through fire, surrender, and transformation.
The heart rests on velvet, surrounded by rose petals and lavender, while etched metal hands create a field of giving and receiving around it. These materials hold different kinds of time, brass carries permanence and heat. velvet offers softness and shelter. roses hold beauty, grief, love, and impermanence. lavender brings associations of rest, cleansing, and care. Together they create a small altar for restoration.”
"Return to the Heart" eLm
How does your creative practice allow you to restore (renew, return, reclaim, recover)?
“My creative practice allows me to restore by giving me a place to listen. I listen to the natural world. I return slowly with deeper presence.
I restore through my hands. Making brings me back to the body when the world pulls me toward urgency, performance, or disconnection. Casting, etching, sewing, arranging petals, and filling the velvet pillow are all acts of attention. They return me to sensation, breath, rhythm, and choice. My hands are not only tools. They are a way of knowing and a way of offering care.
I also restore by reclaiming tenderness as a creative force. The rose petals and lavender create an environment of softness around a material that has passed through fire. The etched hands hold the possibility of giving and receiving from a place of resource. Reciprocity.”
As a queer+, artist, what do you see can be, needs to be, or cannot be restored?
“Growing up as a queer and sensitive being, I learned to shape-shift aspects of myself in order to feel a sense of belonging. As an adult, surrounded by forests and rivers of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I truly understand authentic belonging. Being present in nature is where I feel most at home in my androgynous divine body. Tree Ancestors remind me to take deep breaths and ground. Water reminds me to trust the creative current and flow. The snails remind me to go slow. The Elementals are my teachers of embodiment through observing many life cycles of creation, destruction and re-growth.
To me a queer artist is tending the heart’s sanctuary of infinite transformation. To walk in the path of the tree of life, to feel grief, to feel joy. To lift up systems of liberation and pleasure. To feel the sap rising in our trees in the dead of winter. To roll a seed between our fingers and feel its potential. To trace our tree trunks and sense our roots. To witness the stars and feel connected to our great beyond. This is what needs tending. Restoring our relationship to the queerness nature holds for us. ”
Photographs Courtesy of the Artist