Blue Shop Gallery presents
Ned Elliott
‘To Be Pretty and Free’
Gallery 1
11th - 28th November 2026
PV Wednesday 11th November 6-8pm 2026
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
Gallery opening hours:
Thu - Sat | 12pm - 5pm or by appointment
Ned Elliott (b.1995) is an artist born and raised in London. He graduated from the Royal Drawing School’s Drawing Year in 2023 having previously studied History at University of Bristol. Recent group shows include the Études Pour Objets Immobiles, REGARD, Paris, 2026, London Art Fair, 2025, Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, 2024, Social Tapestry, Chilli Art Projects, 2024, Drawn Together, Royal Drawing School, 2024, Works on Paper 6, Blue Shop Gallery, 2024, Transparency, Bankside Gallery, 2024, A Curious Cloud, Soho Revue, 2024, RBSA Print Prize, RBSA Gallery, 2024, The Very Hours Pass Unnoticed, Warbling Collective, 2024, Best of the Drawing Year, Christie’s, 2023. Prizes include The Janie Roberts Prize for Excellence in Drawing (Royal Drawing School, 2023), and The Young Artist Award (Royal Watercolour Society, 2024). In 2023 he was awarded a residency at Rhode Island School Of Design in the USA. In 2025 he was a mural painter for several stages at Glastonbury. His work is held in the Royal Collection.
Ned Elliott (b.1995) is an artist from London. He is a passionate witness of the multiplicity of existence - not just the world we see and touch and are touched by every day but also the intangible feelings that come with it. Many of his works take inspiration from the natural world but take off into a world of abstraction and imagination but in all his work there is a continuum capturing the transience of existence.
His subject is nature, and his focus moves from the small to the cosmic. His gaze is drawn to those things which are simultaneously frail and beautiful; a moth, a feather, a flower. Using a variety of media and techniques he depicts how different elements of existence, sentient, insentient, intersect and coexist in the world, creating pictures which grow out of the confusing and elusive beauty of life. His work is imbued with an agnostic almost animistic spirituality. Ultimately, his field of exploration is how all things - conscious, animate, inanimate - connect in the world, how we experience that and he strives to show how other beings in the world do that too.
There are two veins to this new exhibition of Ned Elliott’s work. The first explores a question swimming in Ned’s head for the past year, “how does it feel to be so pretty and free?”. He writes, “It’s a bit of a poetic, perhaps, romantic question, but I can’t help but think it, as I walk to work, living a human life constrained in the prism of our myriad social and economic conventions. When I see a flower blooming by the side of the road, how can I not ask, how does it feel to be so pretty and free?” It’s a question we cannot answer, but not all questions need an answer, and so Ned has taken solace and pleasure in imagining a flower basking in the sun, radiating in a rainbow, reaching to the stars, because perhaps that is one step closer to feeling free. But the trouble is, as humans, with our conventions and ways, we cannot help but anthropomorphise and throw symbols onto a flower to tell our human stories, and so he too imagines a flower in mourning, or two flowers in love.
The work made over the past year reflects a year long interest in nature, mostly in the mysterious, beautiful, strange, and enigmatic flower. As well as flowers, the exhibition reflects a continued exploration of his other favourite motifs, the moth, and the comet. As with flowers, he asks, how does it feel to be moth (or butterfly) flying paper thin in the sky? And moving from the minute to the cosmic, looking up high, he finds it is also impossible not to throw a symbolism onto a comet in the sky - the comets in the sky underline the briefness, futility, and meaningless of our existence, and in that he derives a comfort. Similarly, on a micro scale his images of ripples and raindrops are a meditative reflection of our impermanence.
The second vein of the exhibition reflects a developing realisation within Ned’s practice that he likes drawing in different ways and so Ned’s works speak to the playful curiosity and the interest in the aesthetic possibilities of perception and depiction from the literal to the abstracted. In depicting the flowers in different ways, from graphic, “cartoony”, made of orbs, to realistic, and finely rendered, he tells different stories, speaking to his first vein of thought how different beings experience and perceive. The show also reflects his exploratory approach to materials and therefore includes a medley of oil paintings, drawings, etchings, monoprints, each medium allowing for new visual possibilities. In a way, the exhibition is an attempt to embrace the artistic multitudes one has in oneself, but still to tell a singular story, exploring that lingering, question “how does it feel to be pretty and free?”.
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