Phone
+447796 206695
Email
shonaelrick@googlemail.com
shonaelrickart
Shona Elrick
Artists statement
Growing up in rural Aberdeenshire gifted me with a profound emotional connection to Landscape. I create unique landscape paintings, that capture feelings, colours and patterns experienced whilst walking in a landscape. Painted newsprint collage, underpins both my experimental studies and my final oil on canvas paintings. Arbitrary words and phrases are hidden within the work, adding poetry, meaning and synchronicity.
Exhibitions
DO GEESE SEE GOD, Riverside Studios - London — 25 Mar - 11 May 2025
Riverside Artists Group’s Exhibition. www.riversideartistgroup.com 32 artists responding to the theme of palindromes
Open Studios, ACAVA studios, Hythe Rd, NW10 - 17-18 MAY 2025
UNDER ICE, 54 the Gallery, Mayfair, W1J. - 27 Jan - 1 Feb 2025
Group exhibition with the Week 45 Collective.
Winter Exhibition : AKA Fine Art, Cambridge, CB1 7AA. Dec 24 - Jan 25
Selected Exhibition at www.akafineart.co.uk
Painting the Walk, Lauderdale House Gallery, Highgate, N6. 4-24 Dec 24
Joint exhibition with painters Janey Hagger and Felicity Swan.
BEEP Biennale Exhibition, Elysium Gallery, Swansea. 9 Nov - 21 Dec 24
‘I won’t stay in a World Without Love’.
I made it to the Long-list with a small work titled ‘From Now Until Forever’. This painting also travelled to Aberystwyth University, SY23 1NG until April 2025. It has now been one of 52 selected currently on show at Oriel Croeser Gallery, LL48 6SS.
RAG ANNUAL 24, POSK Gallery, Hammersmith, London. 3-14 Nov 2024
Riverside Artists Group’s Annual Exhibition. www.riversideartistgroup.com
ARTWEST Open Studios Event - (Annual since 2009) Sept 2023
Participant from 2009 until 2023, with sometimes roles of treasurer and event joint-lead. In conjunction with http://londondesignfestival.com & www.parkroyaldesigndistrict.com in 2023.
Borders, POSK Gallery, Hammersmith, London. Nov 2023
Riverside Artists Group’s Annual Exhibition. www.riversideartistgroup.com 32 artists using the discipline of collage in its widest sense.
The Gallery at Green & Stone Summer Exhibition, SW3 6HY. Aug 2023
Artwork chosen for this exhibition - ‘House with Snow Cloud’ 2023.
MAYDAY MAYDAY, RIVERSIDE ARTISTS GROUP . May-June 2023
Online exhibition on the theme of ‘Mayday’. Exhibited ‘Thin Red Line’.
‘Paintsongs to the Wild’, Willesden Gallery, NW10. Nov 22
Shona Elrick - Successful solo show exhibiting new works curated by Nadia Nervo. Works included large oils from ‘North Sea Series’; “Hampstead Heath Series’ and 30 pieces for my ‘what3words’ series.
BRICK LANE GALLERY, ‘Art in Mind’, London, E1 6SA. Sept 2022
Selection of oil and collage on canvas paintings in group exhibition.
RIVERSIDE STUDIOS, London. ’Many Rivers to Cross’. Sept 2022
Presented by Riverside Artists Group, responding to ‘the real and metaphorical nature of rivers, in collaboration: my ‘what3words’ series was born as I collaborated with the App ///what3words and the River Thames
Education
Grays School of Art, Aberdeen. BA Painting (Fine Art). 2.1 Hons 1986
University of Hertfordshire. MA Art Psychotherapy. Pass. Distinction
Employment
Art Psychotherapist, Mount Vernon Cancer Centre, HA6 2RN. 2010 - Present (2 Days per week)
Employed by the NHS at Lynda Jackson Centre, Mount Vernon Cancer Centre, Mount Vernon Hospital . Providing psychological support via art therapy, individual and group, to patients and carers impacted by a cancer.
References
(please request contact details from me)
About Shona
Shona grew up in rural Aberdeenshire, Scotland, after studying at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen, she left to work in London, but finds herself settled there with family and studio many years later!
But the love of landscape strongly remains.
SHONA ELRICK - BIO
Shona Elrick grew up in the open rolling farmland of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, where she would spend every available moment outdoors playing, helping out and exploring the local countryside. It is was in this setting that nurtured a deep-rooted and passionate bond to landscape, and therein began expressing her feelings of wonder and awe through paint and pastels.
She studied Fine Art - Painting at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen 1982-1986. During her studies her work was selected to be exhibited at The Scottish Royal Academy and Aberdeen Art Gallery.
Significant influences at this time were to be the work of Henri Matisse and Richard Diebenkorn: Matisse, for both his joyful play of vidid colour as well as his “radical flattening” of imagery on the canvas, and Richard Diebenkorn for his painterly mark-making qualities. These aspects and fascinations still endure in Shona Elrick’s work.
Within a year of graduating she moved to London - a temporary move that finds her still there! Finding herself at a bit of a creative loss, she embarked upon a part time degree in Ceramics at Middlesex University. To Shona’s surprise, working with clay allowed her to explore the qualities of the traditionally 2D mediums of collage and mark-making; this provided the breakthrough in her painting which she has continued with to this day.
Shona Elrick has exhibited mainly in London: including a joint exhibition with Ceramist Sue Paraskeva at the Hiefer Gallery and a wide range of galleries, opens and Art Fairs. She has been an active member of the ArtWest Art Trail since 2009 and latterly she has exhibited with The Riverside Artists Group, again based in West London.
Shona’s continues to live and work in London, although also spends time at her family cottage in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. She also works part-time as an Art Psychotherapist.
SHONA ELRICK - Artist’s Statement
Growing up on a small farm in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, gifted me with a profound emotional connection to landscape: as a small child I would imagine how my ancestors would have walked the same tracks as me, or be moved in the presence of ancient standing stones. But I was also fasciated by the play of colours and patterns , as well as the ever changing drama of the big open skies and all the elements she threw at me.
Therefore in my painting, not only do I wish to communicate my intense emotional responses to being in a landscape: be it a sense of awe, wonder or exhilaration - I simultaneously ‘play’ with aspects of colour and pattern which I find unique to that particular landscape.
My artwork is also concerned with how mark-making and colour can express an experience or moment in a landscape: I employ a multi-media layered approach using mainly oil paint, collage ,pastel, charcoal and pencil. Collage plays a significant role in the feeling and composition of my work: I use oil on newsprint collage - a by-product of my process of cleaning brushes. I started incorporating the newsprint collage for the spontaneous quality of mark as well as articulating specific planes and textures within the image.
My process includes layering, re-working and revising the surface - as in the tradition of the Abstract Expressionists - I am concerned with being authentic to the painting ‘as object’: in simplest terms, paint on a flat surface. On closer inspection the viewer will see arbitrary words or images hidden within the added newsprint collage. For me, these words and images not only bring about an element of synchronicity and poetry, they sometimes reflect the political events of our times - however only I would know where an image of ex-Prime Minister, Theresa May, is hidden in the ‘rocks’ within one of my Cornish seascapes!
In recent years I have concentrated on creating ‘Series’ of works, these being predominantly my ‘Hampstead Heath Series’, inspired from weekly dog walks on Hampstead Heath in London and my ‘North Sea Series’, created from visiting my familiar coastline on the Moray Firth in North East Scotland. New in the pipeline is a series of ‘postcards’ mapping the changing landscape of the River Thames from the estuary to the river’s source.