Luke Elwes (b.1961) lives and works in London. He studied at Bristol University, Camberwell School of Art and Birkbeck, London University (Art History MA 2007).

Throughout the 1990s he travelled extensively, discovering and revisiting remote desert and mountain locations in India, Asia and North Africa. In 1998 he was artist in residence on an expedition to Mount Kailash, a holy mountain in western Tibet.

Since 2000 he has worked for extensive periods on an island off the East Coast of the UK. In 2013 he was awarded a grant to study at the Vermont Studio Centre and in 2015 he was resident artist at the Albers Foundation (USA). In 2011 he was invited to give an ‘Artist’s Eye’ talk at the National Gallery.

The idea of a journey is central to Luke Elwes paintings, both its physical and temporal unfolding and its recollection in memory. As well as recording particular journeys, the paintings reveal, like a hieroglyphic text, the many layers of history buried beneath the surfaces of these places. Rooted in the particular, the images also probe an interior space. They become maps of the ‘geographical unconscious’, suggesting both the trail of our presence and the passage of time.