"I am an unreliable narrator of my own life."

Nelson (she/her) is a contemporary conceptual artist based in Essex. She graduated from the Royal College of Art (2023) and the Royal School of Needlework (ongoing).                                               

At the core of Nelson’s practice is storytelling and the murkiness of the “truth” of one’s own recollections.  Her practice embodies radical vulnerability through a combination of object (primarily hand embroidery), text and film, but always with the visible presence of the artist’s hand at work, as a performative enactment of her subjectivity.  Nelson’s work, therefore, often plays with the messiness and imperfections innate in the human experience.  She is interested in the abject and often mixes uncomfortable visual metaphors with dark humour, believing that this will make the work resonate longer with the viewer.

Nelson considers her work part of the feminist auto-theoretical traditions - she uses episodes from her own story as the source of her work, believing it will yield insights about wider contemporary culture. She invites the audience to use the visual interpretations of her experiences as a springboard to explore their own. Nelson’s primary interest is in deconstructing the tropes commonly associated with women, particularly where the tropes of “mother” and “witch” intersect.

Nelson’s work has been exhibited internationally, including a 2023 screening of her short film “He.., I…” at a Tate Late event at Tate Modern, the broadcasting of a sound piece on “Montez Press Radio”, and inclusion in exhibitions held by “Woman Made Gallery” in Chicago. Nelson has work in the “Procreate Project Archive” and won the Batsford Prize Fine Art Category in 2022 and the Homiens Art Prize in 2024.  Her work was featured in the “Emerging Yorkshire Artists” show at Craven Museum (shortlisted for UK Museum of the Year in 2024).  Nelson’s text work has been featured in a number of publications including the peer-reviewed art writing journal JAWS.