BIOGRAPHY
Red K Elders creates intricate realistic pencil drawings, offering potent contemporary representations of ancient gods and mythic beings.
She lives and works in the remote wild salt marsh coastline of North Norfolk, England. A self taught artist, she has been drawing professionally for just over three years, since losing all her previous work as a bodyworker due to the pandemic.
Elders was a guest on the Mythic Masculine podcast (Dec 21) where she spoke about her drawing ‘Dionysus’ and how she invokes the gods she draws forth through her bodywork, movement and spiritual praxis. She runs a course through The Blackthorn School called ‘Somatic Sorcery’ in which she teaches somatic techniques for enhanced creativity, inspiration and intentionally working with flow states.
Her paper “See Yourself Through These Hands: The moving body as a portal to spirit possession. Working with ancient ritual technologies to create portraits of spirits, gods and mythic beings” was published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Dance, Movement & Spiritualities (Intellect, March 23).
Elders’ signed and editioned prints have been hugely successful and are in private collections worldwide. She is currently working towards her first solo exhibition of her original works: ‘The Deathless Gods’.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
My creative praxis combines deep somatic movement and trance work with ancient sorcerous technologies such as those found in the 2000 year old Greek Magical Papyri. I work with these embodied processes in and with wild nature places to facilitate visionary states which are recorded through poetic writings, and subsequently expressed in my highly detailed pencil drawings of the ancient gods and mythic beings I’m working with.
The drawings are both an homage to the gods, and an offering, in which I invite them to dwell. I am giving them a new embodied form through which they may continue to live and breathe in this world.
I’m fascinated by the nature of creative inspiration, that leads me to consider whether what is present in any great work of art is an indwelling animate force; a spirit or god, that lives on throughout the ages.
Working with this question, I’m compelled deeper into this intersection of movement, creativity and spirituality, and my life seems to become illuminated from within. Even as we all move through increasingly difficult times, we must continue to let ourselves be danced by something greater; especially for all those who can not. We must continually open the seams to allow the movement of some vast majesty that we may never comprehend. Then we become a living work of art. Our lives become a ritual offering of beauty. 