What people say
Evidence-based insight
“Elinor Rowlands artistic practice involves stimming in natural environments in order to access other worlds. In Beauty in the Gothic: Forms of Autistic Aesthetics (2024), she explores how a certain wilderness is necessary for accessing an unfiltered, embodied expression through stimming. Her practice made it clearer for me to recognise this tendency in my own work. In my practice, I have come to understand the wilderness and the stimming as the spiral topology around me and within me, trying to reach each other and make a world together.
My Nordic human-built environments tend to have linear topologies. (I don’t think any other entity on Earth but humans constructs linear topologies). So the further away from humans I move, the more likely I am to find spirally organised environments that my spirally organised bodymind can couple with and feel whole with, feel like I am finally in an environment I have evolved together with, where we have co-evolved to fit each other.”
-Lina Persson, Artistic Researcher
Elinor's practice is deeply rooted in care. Care is not simply something she offers alongside her artistic work; it is threaded through every aspect of her practice, shaping how she creates, collaborates, facilitates and relates to others.
Her approach is thoughtful, attentive and relational, with a genuine commitment to making space for different ways of being, communicating, creating and participating. She works with great sensitivity to access, difference and individual needs, understanding that meaningful creative practice requires time, trust, flexibility and an awareness of the conditions in which people are able to flourish.
Elinor's work embodies a care-full, care-based approach to art-making: one that values connection, interdependence, generosity and collective possibility. She reminds us that care is not separate from artistic practice, but can be its very foundation.
-Gemma Oakley, East Anglian Folklore Centre