How the work is made
From the coast path to the finished piece.
Most days start on foot, camera in one pocket, a folded sketchbook in the other. She knows this coastline by which gate sticks and which path floods first. Nothing is planned. If the light is wrong she comes back tomorrow.
Photographs, dozens of them, of the same rock from four angles. A few pencil lines and a colour note. Sometimes twenty minutes with a small board and a tube of watercolour, made to be looked at later and never to be shown. All of it is raw material.
Back at the screen the sources are layered, cut, scaled, worked over and thrown out. A single piece can carry forty photographs, two studies and a scanned page of marks made with the wrong end of a brush. This is where the work happens, and it takes far longer than the walk.
What she does in the last few hours before a piece is finished stays private. It's the one thing Elin won't put on the website.
A small mirrorless camera she has had for years and will not name. An A5 sketchbook with a rubber band round it. A flatbed scanner that is older than the camera. A tablet and a stylus. A kettle.
- Out before the car park fills.
- Photograph the same place until it stops being interesting, then once more.
- Anything made on paper is source material, not the work.
- If the piece needs explaining, it isn't finished.
- Two pieces are not for sale, and no, still not.