Serena JV Elston is a transdisciplinary sculptor and curator contemplating the body and its relationship to structures of power. Her research-based practice explores ecology, posthumanism, disability, and embodiment through a post-colonial lens. Her work asks if an institution can disable bodies, can bodies disable institutions.
Grappling with disability as identity and condition, she depicts figures in states of decomposition and incompleteness. In her work, the body is never singular; it extends beyond flesh to encompass the institutional, the architectural, and the ideological. She renders bodies as precarious material forms that are vulnerable, interdependent, and impermanent.
Serena interrogates the illusion of immortality alongside the certainty of death, asserting that all bodies, whether organic or constructed, require care to endure. Institutions that appear eternal are, in truth, as fragile as flesh. Through sculptural inquiry, she exposes systems of power as contingent structures sustained by our unconscious participation and vulnerability. By materializing their instability, she invites viewers to recognize the impermanence of these systems as clearly as we recognize our own mortality.