Artist Statement – Helen Jones (Elluse) Helen Jones, known as Elluse, is a Manchester-based hybrid fine artist and digital technologist.
Her work sits between canvas and screen, drawing on city life, rave culture and political undercurrents. These paintings mix urban landscapes, crowds and surreal details with flashes of colour and pattern. Raves under bridges, tigers in fractured stripes, underwater figures and abstract symbols all appear as stand-ins for real experiences: nightlife, protest, mental health, climate anxiety and the pressure to “fit in”. Elluse uses digital tools to test ideas and compositions, then commits them to canvas with layered oil and acrylic. The result is work that feels both rooted in traditional painting and wired into the fast, unpredictable energy of modern life. Rather than offering neat answers, the exhibition invites you to stay with contradictions – freedom and fear, community and isolation, nature and industry. Look closely at the small details and repeated shapes: they hint at stories of working-class culture, underground spaces and people who live just outside the mainstream, still finding ways to dance, think and resist.
