75: Hold the Hand of Difficult Emotions and Explore Inner Fields with Elaine Su-Hui

Thyme in the Studio: Art & Wellness

We get into the power of community and meditation, death and mourning and how to collaborate with others in a way that encourages people to process and transform their inner terrain.

ELAINE SU-HUI (b. 1978, Sydney, Australia) is an artist, facilitator, and dharma practitioner. Her work aims to be a direct expression of her dharma practice, investigating our relationship to change, impermanence, receptivity, and emptiness, through teachings from nature.

Trained as a printmaker, Elaine also makes her own watercolours from respectfully foraged, natural pigments. She is also the founder and artistic director of Inner Fields NY; an intimate, social practice project aimed at breaking down hierarchical and commodity-based forms of interaction, while building a culture of generosity and ecological wisdom. The project is now a collectivized organization of six artists, writers, scholars and educators, and is hosted in various unique sites across the United States.

Deeply influenced by her time living and working in Oakland, CA, in 2009, followed by 10 years living and working in New York, Elaine’s artistic praxis is fiercely oriented around a grassroots approach. Building small, collaborative communities, and liberating one’s creativity from a reputation economy, are core tenets to her ethos of art as a process of care and service. Whether she is investing in long term, collaborative relationships, or slow, material processes made by hand, Elaine prioritizes depth of connection as her primary marker of cultural impact.

Many organizations, mentors, and teachers, have significantly supported and guided Elaine's work and practice. She received her art training from East Sydney Tech; National Art School (Sydney); and RMIT (Melbourne), and was the beneficiary of awards, grants, scholarships, and fellowships from the Silk Cut Foundation; National Association for the Visual Arts; Australian Print Workshop; Ian Potter Cultural Trust; Kala Art Institute (Berkeley, CA); Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (New York, NY); and Prosjektrom Normanns (Stavanger, Norway); each of which has enabled new projects and/ or allowed life-changing decisions to be possible. Her work as senior printer and assistant to the artist SWOON from 2010-2017 was also hugely transformative.

Elaine’s dharma lineage includes Buddhist Theravadin, Chinese Mahayana, and Thai Forest traditions. She dedicates her work in service to the healing and protection of the planet.

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Music by Aaron Travers @aa.travers