Ela is a London-based artist pursuing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art. Trained in architecture and business design, her early encounters with ‘the unseen’ shaped her understanding of reality, perception and existence. Before returning to painting, she spent over fifteen years leading businesses and working as an interdisciplinary consultant, experiences that deepened her awareness of human loneliness and its relationship to life. Working without preparatory sketches, Ela approaches painting as an improvisational exchange between bodily memory, lived experience and the canvas. Through concealment and revelation, fluid gestures and shifting fields of colour, she explores the relationships between material reality, embodied emotion and belief. Traces of the body emerge and recede, holding resilience and tenderness, strength and vulnerability, love and avoidance in tension. For Ela, painting is both an awakening of the suppressed self and an enquiry into human nature. Why do we desire connection yet fear intimacy? Why do we seek love whilst building defences? How do fear, desire, loneliness and hope shape us? Her practice encompasses two interconnected series: Is–Be and Being. Is–Be explores the convergence of observer and observed. Moving between microscopic life and cosmic space, its immersive fields of colour give temporary presence to phenomena beyond ordinary perception, evoking solitude, ecstasy, bewilderment, emptiness and the infinite. Being turns towards emotion and the subconscious. Through luminous colour and bodily traces, the works inhabit a space between waking and dream, exploring how emotions move through and transform the body, and how we might retain love, understanding and compassion beneath social and cultural conditioning. Across both series, Ela investigates perception, consciousness and human existence, reconsidering the boundaries between the visible and invisible, the material and immaterial, and the self and the world.