Elena Steers Art and Illustration

Is it important to you that the art you have in your home is more than a nice picture that matches your interior? These beautiful collages explore stories, memories, and the quiet pull of nostalgia through the use of vintage papers and hand embroidery. Elena creates original artworks and prints that draw on found imagery, textiles, and tactile processes, celebrating the beauty of the overlooked and discarded, giving it new life and purpose.

Elena is particularly drawn to vintage photographs, paper ephemera, and discarded materials that carry traces of their previous lives. These fragments form the starting point of her collages, where she carefully layers, tears, and reassembles them to suggest narratives made by the viewer. Hand embroidery is then introduced as a slow, meditative response to the imagery. Stitching becomes both a drawing tool and a way of connecting, and emphasising emotional details within the work.

Much of her practice is informed by personal and collective memory – childhood recollections, family histories, domestic spaces, and imagined pasts. Elena is interested in how memory can be fragile, selective, and dreamlike, and how handmade processes can reflect this softness and imperfection. By combining paper and thread, she aims to create pieces that feel intimate and quietly evocative, inviting viewers to project their own stories onto the work.

Elena values traditional techniques, patience, and the marks of the artist’s hand, and sees making as an act of care and connection in contrast to our fast, disposable culture, with each original piece being created slowly and intuitively.

Through her unique work, Elena offers moments of reflection and recognition – small visual spaces where memories linger and stories continue to unfold.

Elena has an MA (distinction) in Illustration and is also a practising psychotherapist.