About

I am Eliza Saunders, a Nuxalk (NOO-halk; indigenous to Bella Coola, British Columbia) artist who creates luminous, revelatory and story-driven portraits, primarily through oil painting, often expanding into mixed-media and/or installation work.

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My thematic lexicon is a convergence of Surrealist and Magical Realist genres with Nuxalk mythos and a personal inquiry into innermost memory, transcendental allure, and the inevitability of entropy. The core of my work centers on a sole female doppelganger figure. She acts as a psychic vessel, a container for my own emotional topography, embodying the tense, overlapping relationship between beauty and pain. She appears in moments of mystic transformation, often accompanied by emblematic animals, weapons, and delicacies that function as personal souvenirs of spasmodic but pertinent memories. This figure explores my half-indigenous heritage, dissonant chords of my turbulent dispositions, and the unrelenting pandemonium of my consciousness.

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Artistically, I amalgamate the formality of Italian Renaissance compositions with a reactive, contemporary approach. Inspired by these creators, my work conceptually channels: Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon, Cindy Sherman, and Francesca Woodman. My technique is defined by an abundance of intricate, precise palette knife work to build texture and line—a formal structure that attempts to contain the energy of my personal themes. Simultaneously, a palette of contrasting and displaced color—anchored by my signature burnt-umber blood-red—evokes multifaceted, dream-like states. A standard approach of mine involves contrasting moments of intuitive, tremendous energy and somber, contemplative pauses. This helps me balance out my quiet personal reality and the fiercely ambitious painter I metamorphosize into when I feel my action and awareness begin to merge (flow). The dark visual language I employ is directly inspired by my commitment to authentic portrayal of inter-generational mental wellness issues. Often ideational shifts within my cosmology drive my creation as well. I choose to preserve the tradition of oil painting, recognizing its longevity as a means to carry these narratives forward.

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Ultimately, my painting is an act of vulnerability and salvage. I aim to provoke a aching, ecstatic catharsis in the viewer by depicting the beautiful but cruel overlaps I feel and see in the world. Painting is the means by which I cement the visceral expressions of my ‪‪ㅤ♡ into reality, furthering the bridges between my own fragmented world and my commitment to sharing the stories, culture, and language of the Nuxalk people.

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