Naiya lives and works in Oxford, UK. b. 2003, Watford, UK.
For all inquiries:
naiyaellisw@gmail.com
Instagram
Naiya (she/her, UK) treats living materials as active co-agents in her installations, foregrounding walking and ancestral knowledge systems as a mode of research. She is a multidisciplinary artist studying at The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and her practice spans across installation, textiles, moving image, and writing. Naiya’s work engages with counter-mapping to interrogate how embodied practices of care and labour structure relationships between human and more-than-human worlds. She cultivates speculative environments, populated by salmon nurseries, kelp forests, and algae plains, where mythic presences like the Ceasg surface as ways of thinking through ecological entanglements and our alienation from nature.
Water and hydrofeminist theory operate as a methodological condition in her practice: setting the rhythms of her making through duration, repetition and erosion. Naiya’s work continues to unfold through fieldwork in the Scottish Highlands and Outer Hebrides, informed by oral tradition and intergenerational forms of knowledge transmission. She traces the effects of the Highland Clearances on an agrarian, matriarchal community of salmon nursers and hessian weavers. Structured, time intensive processes like weaving introduce rhythms of care and containment, while organic materials and unstable subject matter allow works to shift and deteriorate. These transformations are treated not as failures of control but as part of the work’s continuing life.
Selected Exhibitions
2025
'Interim', Fusion Arts Oxford, 15 Park End St, Oxford
'Exhibition 004', Worcester College, Oxford
'Dampier Resurrected', Dolphin Gallery, St. John's College, Oxford
2024
'Intertidal Domestics' solo film screening, The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford
'I remember the smell of my natal streams' film screenings, Common Ground, Oxford
'Ruskin Prelims Exhibition', 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
Egerton Coghill Landscape Prize - Winner, 2025
Philip Fothergill Award - Winner, 2025
Work included in
'Ceasg Ultrasound', Alternative Futures, Riso Edition Collection, Weston Library, Oxford, 2025
'Salmon Nurseries', These Accents, 2024