Elaina Venn – RMIT School of Art Graduates

Where Did You Go, Are You Here?

The MFA project where did you go, are you here? Explores my childhood trauma through constructed sculptural forms and objects. The project aims to construct a world where everything is disruptive, dysfunctional, and unanchored. By investigating themes such as the uncanny, and the real, I address my family’s repressed silence, the reliability of my memory and the authenticity of ghosts.

Elaina Venn, *The dividers,* 2025, Tasmanian oak, LED lighting, acrylic paint. Courtesy the artist.

Elaina Venn, *Dark mirrors,* 2025, Tasmanian oak, LED lighting, acrylic sheet, acrylic paint. Courtesy the artist.

Elaina Venn, *Vanity*, 2025, Tasmanian oak, LED lighting, hairbrushes & combs, acrylic paint. Courtesy the artist.

Elaina Venn, *Coming through*, 2025, Tasmanian oak, LED lighting, acrylic paint. Courtesy the artist.

Elaina Venn, *Ladders for Lynda*, 2025. Tasmanian oak, wooden blocks, LED lighting, acrylic paint.Courtesy the artist.

Elaina Venn, *Installation view,* 2025, Tasmanian oak, LED lighting, acrylic paint. Courtesy the artist

Artist Statement

Elaina Venn is a visual artist based in Melbourne/Naarm. Spanning installation, sculpture, painting and drawing her practice engages with childhood trauma and the unreliability of memory and ghosts. Venn’s work occupies a transitional space between the material and immaterial, the haptic and ephemeral, the embodied and transcendent, the past, present and the absent. Her work imagines alternate child-sized worlds in which handmade objects become strange, monochrome and deliberately uncomfortable. Haunted, real or imagined these constructed worlds function as portals into speculative realms.

http://www.elainavennartistcom.com

Elaina Venn