Emily Elkins

Elkins transforms her photographs by creating patterns that vary, depending on the viewer, from jarring to calming, mimicking her own reactions to stress such as hyperventilation or reciting phrases repeatedly.  Her life-long history of mental illness, anxiety primarily, has influenced her practice by focusing on the vibrational elements repeated imagery creates. From her fixation on repetition she creates staged scenes of familiar places coated in the endless pattern to create a new space for one to contemplate their own imaginary perceptions of space, both internal and external. 

While the recreated and patterned image is at the centre of her practice, the unaltered external landscape also has an important role to play by recording physical movement from anxiety such as shaking. The image is otherwise unchanged and depicts familiar scenes which we are all capable of viewing. The two types of images in conjunction with one another place the literal and the imagined side-by-side to show the complicated dichotomy of the internal and external experience. 

Her goal isn’t for the work to stay in a personal place, but instead to mature into something that adds to the social commentary of psychological illnesses that her and so many others are afflicted by.