Elena Unger

Elena Unger grew up in Vancouver, Canada and moved to London in 2015 to study art. She is an alumnus of Fine Art at Goldsmiths, as well as a recent graduate of Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge. As both an artist and an academic, her art practice and academic work mutually inform one another. As an artist she combines painting, sculpture, performance, sound, film, and installation to produce immersive, extra-liturgical installations. In her academic work in philosophy, Elena is concerned with poesis, kenosis, apophatic theology, and the theology of negative space. Elena was recently a CHASE Junior Research Fellow at Goldsmiths in Theology and Art, as well as an artist in residence at Saint Bartholomew the Great in London.

“I am both an artist and an academic, and as such, both practices feed into one another in my work. As an academic, I explore the question of how the infinite may be revealed or “unfolded” in a contracted, finite space. As an artist, I explore this question with regards to the metaphysical potential of art. I do this by creating installations which combine painting, sculpture, performance and sound, in order to produce immersive exhibitions which usually take place in deconsecrated spaces. The aim of these exhibitions is to in some way make those spaces sacred again.

While much of my practice is highly controlled, the paintings, which are at the center of it all, are largely beyond my control as they appear fully formed in my mind like waking dreams, which I am driven to interpret through the practice of painting, as well as the expanded field of installation where I am able to allow the hermetically sealed images to become more present within space, spilling into a larger context”.

Selected exhibitions include: Invisible Church, St. James Hatcham Church (2019); Fragment I:, Saint Bartholomew the Great (2018); Kenosis: Permanent exhibition at Saint Bartholomew the Great; Group film exhibition at the CHASE Religion and Art Symposium (2021); Fragment II: with Sophie Sleigh-Johnson at Saint Bartholomew the Great (2018).

/* The paintings, which are at the center of it all, are largely beyond my control as they appear fully formed in my mind like waking dreams */