TRUDI VAN DER ELSEN

PORTALS

Curated by Sharon Murphy

PORTALS invites the viewer into a threshold a gateway into another world, a multi-dimensional field where perception expands and the boundaries between the visible and the unseen loosen. Each painting becomes a portal of fiction: a space for projection, meditation, and the gathering of information.

The process of making these works is itself a kind of crossing. Through repeated gestures, erasures, re-markings, and the slow accumulation of surface, a portal gradually comes into being. The paintings evolve through cycles of emergence and disappearance – spaces growing, contracting, dissolving, and re-forming. Time here is dynamic: it is embedded in the movement of paint, in each trace of revision, and in the perceptual shifts that unfold over the duration of making.

The works draw on multiple spatial registers: hyperspace and the digital web, natural space and bodily space, atmospheric and cosmic space. As the layers build, the canvas becomes an experimental terrain where these dimensions meet. The strata of marks form an abstract language, a conversation between lines and openings, between interior and exterior worlds, between what is known and what lies beyond recognition.

To make or to view a portal requires courage. It asks for a loosening of perception and an openness to transformation. These paintings trace that journey, the subtle psychic shifts, the emotional thresholds, the moments where one crosses into a wider field of experience and emerges altered.

Portals may be narrow at first, but once passed through, they release the viewer into unfamiliar expanses: spacious, resonant, and alive with possibility.

TRUDI VAN DER ELSEN, is a contemporary multi-media artist, based in Ireland since 2004. Her practice includes painting, drawing, installation work, performance and lens-based media. She exhibits regularly both nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions have included; Súil Gallery, Annual Open, Ennis 2025, NOSTOS, Weber & Weber gallery, Turin, Italy, 2025. Looking Out, ArtNetdlr, selected by Pauline Flynn, Dún Laoghaire, Dublin, 2025. Capturing Nature, Drawing Box, curated by Katrīna Tračuma, Culture Centre, Jelgava, Latvia, 2025. Bucolica, Invited artist to Art in the Gardens, with Artform, Mount Congreve Gardens, Co.Waterford, 2024. Beyond Brushstrokes: Between Matter and Memory, curated by Sara Foust, Courthouse Gallery, Ennistymon and Burren College of Art 2024, ECHO, solo exhibition at Walters, Dún Laoghaire, Dublin 2023, Estuary, solo exhibition at Custom House Gallery, Westport, Co Mayo 2023, Sionainn, solo exhibition, Limerick Museum 2023, OPERE, Weber & Weber Gallery, Turin, Italy, 2023, Breaking Borders, Curated by Valeria Ceregini, Luan Gallery, Athlone & GOMA, Waterford, 2022, Artists from Ireland, online exhibition, Sasse Art Museum, Los Angeles, USA, 2021, Fragmented Perception, solo exhibition, Weber & Weber Gallery, Turin, Italy, 2021, RHA Annual, Dublin, Ireland, 2020, Notes From A Digital Sea, solo exhibition, Burren College of Art Gallery, Ireland 2020. XR-Extended Reality, solo exhibition, Toledo, Spain 2019. Her work has been supported by the Arts Councils of Holland and Ireland, as well as Culture Ireland and Clare County Council. Her work is in private and public collections internationally, and in Ireland collected by the OPW, LCGA and Clare County Council. She was Gallery Curator at Ennistymon Courthouse Gallery from 2009 -2016.

Website: https://www.trudivanderelsen.com
Instagram: @trudivanderelsen #trudivanderelsen