Elly Drew is an artist working across painting, sculpture, and material-led experimentation. Her practice centres on embodiment, touch, and the quiet negotiations between the body and the materials it encounters. Guided by an intuitive process, she approaches making as a form of listening—allowing clay, paint, fabric, and found objects to suggest their own transformations rather than forcing them into predetermined outcomes.

Elly’s work often explores the tension between vulnerability and resilience. Forms emerge that feel lived‑in, held, or imperfect—what she calls her “failed vessels”: objects that lean, collapse, sag, or resist completion, yet carry their own presence and agency. These pieces become reflections on the human condition, materiality, and the stories embedded in surfaces shaped by hand and time.

Currently studying for an MA in Fine Art at Winchester School of Art, Elly continues to expand her research into embodied making, diagramming practices, and the emotional labour of materials. Her studio practice is an ongoing dialogue—slow, intuitive, and deeply connected to the physical world.

The MA Fine Art is taking me in new directions:
Proposal for The Loo-vre: Cultural Access Repair Station

The Loo-vre is a proposed participatory public artwork that explores cultural exclusion and belonging through an unexpected site: the public toilet.  Historically, access to toilets has often reflected wider inequalities around class, disability, gender, safety, and public participation.  The project uses the toilet as both a practical and symbolic space through which to examine who is welcomed into public life and who is left outside.

The Loo-vre would become a series of community-led "cultural access repair stations."  Working with local participants, I would collect stories about barriers to engaging with society, arts and culture, including financial obstacles, physical accessibility, feelings of intimidation, social expectations, and experiences of exclusion.

These stories would be transformed into a visible public intervention using text, painting, signage, drawing, and participatory mark-making.  Community members would contribute directly to the artwork, creating a collective map of what needs repairing and what conditions help people feel they belong.

The resulting intervention would invite audiences to reconsider access not as a technical problem but as a relationship that requires continual care and maintenance.  By making invisible barriers visible, the project seeks to create hopeful conversations about how cultural spaces can become more welcoming, equitable, and human.

My practice already involves

·       embodiment

·       material listening

·       participation

·       equality

·       social symbolism

·       everyday objects carrying larger meaning

The toilet is memorable, humorous, slightly uncomfortable, and immediately understandable.  It creates a strong story.  The project understands repair as the restoration of access, dignity, and belonging.  While Visible Mending is often associated with repairing physical objects, I propose that cultural access can also fracture.  Many people experience barriers that prevent participation in artistic and public life.  Through collaborative storytelling and public artmaking,  The Loo-vre makes these fractures visible while creating a collective space to imagine and model repair.  The intervention celebrates participation itself as a form of mending.

‘The Loo-vre transforms public space into a cultural access repair station, using community stories and participatory art to make invisible barriers to arts engagement visible and collectively reimagined.’

Artistic Approach

My practice explores embodiment, materiality, participation, and belonging through sculpture, text, installation, and socially engaged processes.

I am interested in how everyday objects and spaces can become sites for broader conversations about social experience.  Rather than producing fixed statements, I create opportunities for reflection, dialogue, and collective meaning-making.  The Loo-vre uses humour, familiarity, and participation to address serious questions about access while remaining welcoming and approachable.