Every artwork begins long before Elsa enters the studio. It starts in the outdoors, walking and observing the tiny details of the natural world. She photographs a range textures and colours and prints them on archival paper. She dismembers the photos and painstakingly reassembles them into new scenes that look like paintings.

Elsa approaches photomontage as a painterly medium, using tiny hand-cut photo fragments to create the illusion of depth and form. She layers thousands of these pieces as if they were ‘brush strokes’ to create a sense of volume and movement. Her emotive use of colour express the sensations, memories, and emotions connected to a particular place and moment.

Her work is less about documenting a landscape exactly as it appears, and more about capturing the feeling of having experienced it.

Relying on her own image-making process, Elsa explores the human desire to collect, record, and preserve the moments that shape our lives. Her photographic collages are a way of layering time into a painting; reflecting our deep-seated fear of forgetting and our instinct to preserve what is meaningful.

In a world that is increasingly digitally enhanced, creating these works by hand has become a meditative escape for Elsa. Each piece is a quiet act of remembrance and an attempt to create a personal impression of time itself.