Veiled Reflections by Elise Stanley

Overview

"Veiled Reflections" is an introspective exhibition by early-career artist Elise Stanley, and includes a series of drawings and screen prints exploring the tension between fragility and strength, visibility and concealment. Centring on self-portraiture, Elise reflects on evolving perceptions of the fat, female body, shaped by lived experience and personal memory. This body of work continues her broader exploration of femininity, vulnerability, and autonomy through printmaking and drawing.

The works depict the artist in both recognisable and obscured forms. Handwritten text becomes an extension of voice — raw, emotional, and intimate — evoking moments of tenderness, defiance, and self-assertion.
Paper functions as more than a substrate; it becomes a metaphor for skin in its physical capabilities to be torn, smoothed, marked, and reclaimed. The use of screen printing, with its layering, repetition, and transparency, further reinforces the work's themes of presence, erasure, and embodied memory.

In challenging dominant narratives around the body "Veiled Reflections" reclaims space for softness, scale, and self-representation outside of normative ideals. Through materially sensitive and emotionally honest processes, the artist's body — veiled, mutable, and powerful — is witnessed on its own terms.

Image credit: Elise Stanley "In Motion #6" 2025, CMYK Screenprint, 112 x 76cm, photo courtesy the artist