Nelson
Blood and milk
Digital painting taken from a filmed performance
2023
"Blood and Milk" commemorates the physical and mental sacrifices women make to bear and raise children. It provokes a question about the value society places on these sacrifices, which are commonly seen as everyday or mundane instead of transformative and miraculous.
Nelson (she/her) is a contemporary conceptual artist based in London. Primarily working in performance, Nelson explores themes of trauma, memory, and self-identity in her work.
Much of Nelson’s work plays with the idea of the abject, and she often mixes uncomfortable visual metaphors with dark humour believing that this will make the work resonate longer with the viewer.
Nelson considers her work part of the auto-ethnographic and auto-theoretical traditions – she uses episodes from her own story as the source of her work, believing it will yield insights about issues in our wider society, particularly around how women are treated and how childhood trauma affects us as adults. She invites the audience to use the visual interpretations of her experiences as a springboard to explore their own.
