The magnet at the core of Anet van de Elzen’s work is porous, generous and profound, its energy shifting in currents of reflection, making a restless procession of human identity. Her images of fractured people caught between poverty and transcendence are at once recognisable and disturbingly original. They are never allowed to be self portraits or glimpses of the artist’s identity, that vanity is far below Van de Elzen’s purpose. These figures that are animated by shuddering light or performed in dislocated time, are emotional denizens, genies of our anxious condition. They have been caught and exposed in self operated traps at the periphery of our knowing. Prophets on a lonely road that is terrifyingly familiar to our enforced forgetfulness.

Van de Elzen is not engaged in the current jestership of ego, where the artist becomes their own brand. She skilfully looses sight of that thin costume before she loads the film, opens the clay or walks into an audience. True, her photographs and performances are painfully inspired and intensely directed by her experiences of grief, joy, alienation, comfort, hurt, doubt and all the other hungers that gnaw our souls into the recognition of mortality. Her tribe of stained inventions are denser and more dangerous than autobiography, they are bred in a greater enigma. Their genius of imperfection slips and overlaps personality through a series of blurs and disguises. They sensually embrace and dissolve the contours of gender and race in their desire to celebrate the weird frailty of their tiny moment of existence. The shape shifting increases in her mesmeric performances. Here they flow and transform, tinting invisibility with grandeur. Creating atmospheres of rich tension and poignant stillness. Singing images of a succulent and mysterious poetry, stirring dormant memories in their unsuspecting audience.

Van de Elzen is a restless artist, incapable of accepting her last remarkable image, always agitating her imagination, attempting new roads. This makes it difficult to critically separate the strands of her work, each part informs and cross fertilises the next, both in metaphor and action, this can be most clearly seen in the relationship between her sculptures and her photographic portraits of figures caught in lost
intentions. Here the very processes of modelling and casting have possessed the camera and its subject. Even the alchemy of darkroom development has been infected, setting the concealed light into a series of smothering and healing substances; clay, milk and charcoal saturate the prints. Alkalines and antidotes that displace acids and hush poisons. Porous earthbound unction’s smearing the moving bodies and raw expressions. A balm of quietness worn in empty rooms, to remove violence in exchange for the continuity of strangeness.

When I was wrangling the five original artists to make the group for
The Wolf In the Winter, I sought a certain independence of response, a
quality of action that was alien to applause and nourished by a creed to extend the imagination. Also an ambiguity of power, the beast as victim and aggressor ; the tenderness of wolves. Our pack was inconceivable without Anet. Her brilliant contradictions of caring fierceness and nurturing impatience made her prime she-wolf. Since then she has led us, become our compass, snapping, nudging and encouraging the group forward into greater experiments and unknown territories. Changing us from a one-off event into a constantly evolving company. If you ask her about any of these triumphs she will cite somebody else as being the instigator or inspiration. Her modesty will describe her procession of startling images as circumstance to the place and situation in which she found herself. This is her only lie.

All her images are parents to our unease, carefully made to snare and unhook our defences just at the moment we recognise and reach forward to embrace kinship and agree with their familiar haunted solitude. Of which we are made..

Brian Catling, Autumn 2003

Brian Catling (1948 - 2022) was a sculptor, poet and performance artist and professor of fine art at the University of Oxford, where he taught at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. He also was a fellow of Linacre College.