Rebecca Elves is a visual artist using painting and ceramics to build fictional worlds. Using hand coiling to emphasise traces of touch, she invites clay to take on a life of its own. As vessels emerge, they become characters. Once fired, their innards become unreachable. A pressure builds: unknown things inside pushing against the pressure of the world beyond their ceramic walls. By painting directly from these vessels, the stories simmering inside them begin to spill.
Recent exhibitions include Slip, Oceans Apart Gallery (2026), Necrology, Haarlem Art Space (2025), VESSEL, OHSH Projects (2024), Multitasking, Lido Stores (2024), What I See I’ll Never Tell, Wilder Gallery (2021) and The Studio at 4am, Hastings Contemporary (2020). Rebecca has spoken about her practice at venues including Drawing Conversations 5, UCA (2024) & Drawing Room (2023). In 2023 she was commissioned to create site-specific ceramic listening vessels in Romney Marsh; in 2021, she was awarded a British Council Research Venice Research Fellowship. She completed her MA at the Royal College of Art in 2016, where she was awarded the Gordon Peter Pickard travel bursary.
