Naiya lives and works in Oxford, UK. b. 2003, Watford, UK.
For all inquiries:
naiyaellisw@gmail.com
Instagram
Naiya treats living materials as active co-agents in her installations, hovering at an edge of sight where places are sensed before they are fully seen, images are misremembered, and boundaries slip in and out of view. She is a multidisciplinary artist in her final year at The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and her practice spans across installation, textiles, moving image, and writing.
Growing up on a narrowboat on British canals informs her sensitivity to fluctuating watery systems and sets the rhythms of her making: field margins, floodplains behind carparks, not quite rural not quite urban, hemp against steel against lichen. Naiya is cultivating speculative environments that emulate the natural as if it were an artefact that has been excavated or inherited, dug up and passed down, where mythic presences like the will-o’-wisp surface as ways of thinking through our estrangement from nature. Through collective sensing workshops, she reimagines cartography as a communal, performative process, asking how we might attune to landscapes where water is constantly redrawing the map.
Naiya’s work is driven by an investment in process: meditative, repetitive acts of making emerge from walking and bodily sensation, held in tension with materials that shift, erode, and resist her control. She wonders if her textiles are psychic terrains where each pick of the weave is a pixel, slowly loading into a frayed memory, never fully resolved.
Selected Exhibitions
2026
'Edgelands', duo show, Belsyre Garage, 75 Woodstock Rd, Oxford
2025
'Interim', group show, Fusion Arts Oxford, 15 Park End St, Oxford
'Exhibition 004', group show, Worcester College, Oxford
'Dampier Resurrected', solo show, Dolphin Gallery, St. John's College, Oxford
2024
'Intertidal Domestics', solo film screening, The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford
'Ruskin Prelims Exhibition', group show, The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford
'Anatomy', group show, The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford
2023
'Trowbridge 23', group show, Trowbridge College, Wiltshire
Education
2023 - 2026 BFA Fine Art, Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford
2022 - 2023 Foundation Diploma in Fine Art, Trowbridge College, Wiltshire College & University Centre
Awards
ORB Art Prize - Shortlisted, 2026
Egerton Coghill Landscape Prize - Winner, 2025
Philip Fothergill Award - Winner, 2025
Work included in
'Càrn Na Mnà', Unquiet Press Issue II, 2026
'Will-o'-the-wisp', Ruskin Riso Collection, Weston Library, Oxford, 2026
'Letters to Living Islands', Ruskin Shorts film screening, Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford, 2026
'Ceasg Ultrasound', Alternative Futures, Riso Collection, Weston Library, Oxford, 2025
'I remember the smell of my natal streams', group film screening, Common Ground, Oxford
'Salmon Nurseries', These Accents, 2024