Popped Off

'[Painting is] a dance between physical marks and external associations that collide, tumble together, separate, resolve, and obscure. For me it mimics the experience of thought and behaviour,’ says Elizabeth Neel. Her artworks, often informed by her childhood in rural Vermont, explore themes of violence, nature and death through the signifying language of paint itself, veering energetically between abstraction and figuration. Popped Off is inspired by the well-known dystopian short story by Shirley Jackson, ‘The Lottery’. First published in the New Yorker in 1948, it centres on the inhabitants of a fictional town in New England who observe the deadly annual superstitious ritual said to bring a good harvest: selecting a sacrificial victim by means of a public sweepstake and stoning them to death. In this piece, Neel juxtaposes the frantic, violent motion in the mass of animalistic forms with the stillness of the tree in which the animal had sought shelter before being fired at by its human trackers.