ELEPHANT • 19th May 2020

Animal Crossing Is Keeping Art Communities Alive in Lockdown

The game is open-ended; if there’s an “aim of the game”, it’s to build your own island and pay off the debts you incur in doing so as you borrow money from an ominously droopy-eyed racoon-tycoon called Tom Nook. However, Nook is generous with loans and easy-going about being paid back. Plus, as money will literally grow on trees, there’s no real stress involved and it’s easy to let the economic focus drift and concentrate instead on long walks on the beach and building your extensive personal sh

ELEPHANT • 8th May 2020

Banish Lockdown Boredom with These Arty Board Games

Board and card games can be polarising. Some people play them weekly, holding regular, sociable nights with an almost religious observance; they can tell you the difference between a gateway game and a tableau builder, and use words like “meeples” and “optimal area control”. Then there are those who haven’t played a game since that terrible Monopoly night ten years ago, when they flipped the board in frustration and cried. Whichever type of player you consider yourself to be, in these strange t

Wrap • 4th May 2020

Finding Balance in Shape and Colour

For Mexican artist Alejandra García y Gutiérrez, the creative process is all about finding balance. Her artworks – paintings, murals, sculptures and photography – feature geometric shapes and bold colours, through which she creates her distinctive compositions.“ My style is about creating a sense of balance,” she tells us. “I am totally convinced that colour is the most important thing in my work. The contrast of bright and opaque colours come together to create a sense of harmony.” Alejandra

ELEPHANT • 30th April 2020

Is Your Face Still Your Own in the Digital Boom of Social Distancing?

During this time of social-distancing, it feels harder than ever to forbid ourselves the brain-anaesthetizing comfort of the mindless social media scroll. However, bereft of the usual photo evidence of friend-filled pub trips, weekend getaways and companionable coffee shop snaps, our feeds are looking a little different these days. As we follow government protocol and remain inside, the photographic focus has also turned inward, as our friends display the intimate details of their homes, their f

Wrap • 27th April 2020

Maaike Canne’s artworks tell the tales of architecture

Based in Rotterdam, visual artist and illustrator Maaike Canne is surrounded by interesting buildings. It’s no wonder then that she’s intrigued by architecture, and that this interest finds its way into her work. Whilst many of the buildings in Maaike’s artworks are imagined, for her Architect Series she focusses on real-life works by some of her favourite architects – Le Corbusier and Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Gio Ponti – recreating their designs in stylish, detailed digital illus

Wrap • 22nd April 2020

Look again! Tim Lahan uses familiar objects to highlight big ideas

From politics and the environment, to our modern day reliance on social media, American artist and illustrator Tim Lahan tackles some important themes in his work. With a client list most freelancers would dream of – Google, Nike, The New Yorker and the New York Times – as well as solo shows and published zines, he has a skilful ability to visualise ideas in a versatile and engaging way. Here he talks us through some of the topics he feels most passionate about, and the different styles he uses

Wrap • 16th April 2020

Colourful and contrasting, Ana Popescu’s paintings from Japan

Visual artist Ana Popescu is a space explorer. Not the kind who sets off in a rocket, but the sort who, through her fresh portrayals of places and environments, invites her viewers to re-examine the everyday spaces they inhabit. On a recent month-long residency at Studio Kura, in Fukuoka, Japan, Ana photographed a “visual diary” of the places that intrigued her as she wandered around the rural Japanese town. From the photographs, Ana recreated these spaces using acrylic paint and Molotow mark

Wrap • 10th April 2020

Antonio Carrau celebrates artistic freedom

When Antonio Carrau was a child, a future in art didn't seem likely. “I was not a talented painter,” says the Uruguayan artist. “I grew up in the countryside and my family was more into cows and sheep than art.” However, despite unlikely beginnings, Antonio has definitely earned the right to call himself an artist. Using glossily lacquered Glace paper, he creates vibrant exciting collages, teasing the eye with his abstract patterns that simultaneously suggest and resist resemblance to recogni

ELEPHANT • 8th April 2020

The Essential Artists You Need to Know Right Now

Second generation Chinese-Canadian artist Dominique Fung takes the often problematic depictions of the East in Western art—think Henri Rousseau and Jéan Léon Gérôme and their exoticized paintings of far away lands—and reconfigures them through her own lens. Drawing on Orientalist ideologies and artefacts, she dismantles and reframes them within warm, luscious and surreal landscapes. The artist’s work was supposed to be on display until 12 April at London’s Mamoth gallery, in a group show called

ELEPHANT • 2nd April 2020

ASMR Videos Offer Intimate Connection in this Time of Self-Isolation

My sister has spent a good chunk of her time during this period of social-isolation worrying about her hair. Her roots are showing but she can’t go to a hairdresser right now, or even, in good conscience, pop to the chemist to pick up a box of DIY dye. Perhaps a trivial concern in light of everything that’s going on, but as a soon-to-be-graduating NHS recruit, within a few weeks she’s going to be thrown onto the front line of twelve-hour hospital shifts, daily contact with actual people, and eve

ELEPHANT • 1st April 2020

How Coronavirus Ate the Art School

The decision to pause school also seemed like the only humane thing to do. As the border between the UK and the US closed indefinitely, I stood £500 out on a cancelled trip to visit my mom with early onset dementia. As her only surviving family member, I needed to sell her house this month in order to continue paying for her care. The last thing I wanted to think about was how my art practice would fit into Paul Thompson’s self-described “matrix of opportunities” for next term. And if I chose to

ELEPHANT • 26th March 2020

This Beat is Super-Yonic: Janelle Monáe’s PYNK Heralded the Age of the Vulva

Turns out there’s a word for that; while the word “yonic” is far less well-known than its masculine equivalent of ‘phallic’ (*sigh*, patriarchy), boy is it a useful word to know when watching Monáe’s music video. From the beginning, Monáe and her entourage flaunt the suggestive imagery. Wearing trousers that are undeniably reminiscent of labia, the women strike power poses in beautifully robotic choreography (just in case you forget that they’re still in a sci-fi dystopia), all the while drawing

Wrap • 18th March 2020

The Power of Exaggeration in the Work of Alva Skog

In their illustrations, Alva Skog portrays the exaggerated figures of women and non-binary people, giving them authoritative dominance with towering stances, strong bodies, and huge powerful hands. We talk to Alva about the pressures of short deadlines, how their personal projects have influenced their approach to drawing and representing people, and how important their illustration agency has become to them. You’ve had a roller coaster couple of years since you graduated from London's Cen

Wrap • 12th March 2020

Sophi Gullbrants tackles sex and wellness issues in her work for Dame Products

As the Junior Designer for the US-based, female-led sexual wellness company Dame Products, Sophi Gullbrants spends a lot of her time creating illustrations for topics exploring the intersections between sex, relationships and personal wellbeing. Whether creating designs for the packaging of the company’s latest sex toy, making artwork for the monthly Sex Horoscopes on the company’s digital blog Swell, or thinking up designs to accompany an article on whether aphrodisiacs really do work, Sophi re

Wrap • 10th March 2020

BD Graft

Often humous and gently irreverent, Brian de Graft’s artworks are always compelling. While each colourful drawing, painting, or hand-made collage feels different and individual, motifs which draw on nature recur in his work, creating a consistent sense of style throughout. “Whether they depict a humorous bottom pinch, a beautiful plant, or a bee – what they have in common is that they show the coexistence of the natural world,” he tells us. “Put simply, my artworks are celebrations of life.”

Wrap • 5th March 2020

Mural Masters

This attitude isn’t the only thing Carla has pulled from her childhood. She says of her style, “Maybe it’s got something to do with growing up in the ‘90s – all those primary colours and simple cartoons with strong, black key-lines.” It’s a style that lends itself easily to her larger-than-life eye-catching murals, but she hasn’t always worked on such grand scales. Moving on from smaller creations, Carla practised by painting on a friend’s wall, experimenting and letting herself make mistakes wh

ELEPHANT • 3rd February 2020

These Photographers Urge Us to Accept Our Place in the Natural World

Our fascination with photographing the human form might come across as slightly egocentric. As a species, are we just a bit too self-obsessed? The answer, is probably yes. But as the works at Rotterdam’s Haute Photographie show, there’s more to photographic depictions of the human body than fashion shoots and selfies. In the midst of the current climate emergency, it can be easy to forget that humans are just as much a part of the natural world as the icebergs melting at the Earth’s poles. Erns

Wrap • 28th January 2020

Interview: Charlie Oscar Patterson

Charlie Oscar Patterson’s bright geometric wall-pieces play with the distinction between painting and sculpture, experimenting with lines and spatial boundaries in a manner which is somehow simultaneously minimalist and exuberant. He has long been influenced by music, listening and responding to his favourite pieces as he creates his art. However, his more recent work takes his musical interest further, so that he views his artworks as instruments in themselves – experimenting with and interpret

ELEPHANT • 23rd January 2020

How Sabrina the Teenage Witch Played Into Our Modern Obsession With Astrology

Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which begins its third season this week, is a whole different broomstick, and its points of difference reveal how the presentation of witches in visual culture changes according to the brand of feminism it temporally coincides with. When society feels precarious, we gain a new wave of feminism and visual culture gains a new wave of witches. During the 1960s’ Women’s Movement, Bewitched saw Samantha asserting her power while remaining a good housewife

ELEPHANT • 9th January 2020

How Director Terence Nance Brought Afrofuturism Into the Light

While Nance has said that he sees his work more as Afrosurrealism, there is no denying that Afrofuturistic elements are fundamental to his work and ever-present. It is also evident that their appearance paved the way for the aesthetic to move into mainstream explorations of Africa and the African diaspora in Western visual culture. Nance’s legacy is films like Sharon Lewis’s Brown Girl Begins (2017) and Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018), as well as music videos such as Jay Z’s Family Feud (201