Elspeth Vince

In my work, emotional nuance meets quiet disquiet. I create worlds where figures move beyond traditional representations of womanhood, inhabiting shifting roles - a landscape, a monster, a sea nymph, a woman.

The body is bound, contorted, and cramped, holding both tension and stillness. I explore loss, power, and self-possession, creating space for viewers to engage with the universal challenge of identity and connection. Figures twist into shapes that feel simultaneously alive and suspended, like a breath held too long. These gestures speak to constraint and ritual, how we honour, mourn, and move through what it means to be human.

Turning to the image in the mirror, I use the mirror as a door, a portal to fold the world out on itself. Light, repetition, and dampness create lonely, still worlds. Through the intricacies of our own inner worlds, I push at the edges of female identity, reclaiming the authorship of women’s bodies that western culture long ascribed to male genius.

In this constant tension between stillness and movement, the body resists containment. As figures dissolve and reassemble, caught between states of life and death, the frame itself becomes a threshold - revealing the shifting, entropic force of the body that defies resolution.

“I paint figures that slip between stillness and collapse — suspended in cramped sacred spaces where emotional nuance meets quiet disquiet.”

6 questions with Elspeth Vince

We ask our emerging artists 6 questions to uncover what drives their work, practice, and creativity.

What themes or questions do you find recurring in your work?

I’m drawn to thresholds - moments where things slip between states, particularly between life and death, stillness and collapse. A recurring question is how the body is framed: compositionally, symbolically, and culturally. My paintings often explore distortion, crampedness, and the tension between containment and escape. Iconography; especially that drawn from religious and funerary imagery recurs frequently, as do references to altarpieces, church windows, and the idea of the sainted or enshrined figure. I’m interested in entropy, in what happens when something revered begins to unravel.

Can you describe a pivotal moment in your journey as an artist?

Clearing my mum’s and grandfather’s homes after they died was formative, not in a sentimental sense, but in terms of visual and spatial impact. Those environments were full of held tension: cluttered but hollow, half-preserved, half-decaying. That experience sharpened my attention to framing, both the literal framing of space and the symbolic framing of memory, power, and identity. It made me think more deeply about how we trap, elevate, or distort what we want to hold onto. It wasn’t a single turning point, but a slow shift that continues to ripple through my work.

What materials or processes are most important in your practice - and why?

Using oil paint is key for me, washing it with solvents to use it in a way where it becomes like watercolour, leaving slight traces and drips of colour. I often work at scale or in elongated formats that evoke altarpieces or stained-glass windows, using the vertical axis to play with reverence, awkwardness, or the body’s distortion. The act of framing, literally, symbolically, or architecturally drives much of my decision-making. I treat the picture plane as something unstable, where a figure might appear to slip through, collapse into it, or be trapped within. The surface is never fully fixed, it always feels like something is being held together just barely.

How do you want people to feel when they experience your work?

I want them to feel slightly off-balance, as if they’ve entered a space that is familiar and strange at once. Ideally, there’s a kind of quiet intensity or unease that builds over time. I’m not interested in spectacle, but in something slower and more internal: the way a cramped or distorted body might echo in your own. I want it to feel like an image you almost remember, or a relic of something sacred that’s been eroded.

What does a typical day in your studio look like?

I usually begin by sitting with the work, making a coffee not touching anything for a while, just looking. I move between sketching, adjusting compositions. There’s often a lot of wrestling with edges, with how light or pressure is framed. I spend a lot of time on things that might barely show in the final image. The actual painting happens fast and intuatively its about having the right frame work and ground to allow that to happen. I’m all about routine!

What dreams or hopes do you have for your artistic journey?

To keep making and to be able to never stop!