House of Belonging

House of Belonging is Elsie Harbour’s debut solo exhibition, exploring a felt sense of belonging. This body of work reflects on feelings and memories of trust, mystery, love, friendship, vulnerability, sensitivity, desire, grief and connection.

Here, Elsie responds to an internal questioning and gentle exploration.

What makes up my silvery web of belonging?
If these feelings, memories, mysteries and somatic experiences were a landscape, how would I move through it?
How would it move me?
If this feeling was colour, wind, water, light or movement, how might it appear?

Rather than seeking conclusion or knowing, Elsie considers art-making as a process of alchemising felt sense into form. House of Belonging translates inner realms into a visual terrain that can reflect the complexity and kindred tenderness of the heart.

To the artist, each painting is a risk. To surrender into feeling. The finished works sit somewhere between knowing and unknowing, inviting the viewer to turn towards feeling.

House of Belonging opens on the 16th of October with a live cello performance by Chris Bird. The exhibition runs until the 19th of October at The ArtShed, Mparntwe, Alice Springs.


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Elsie Harbour is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice is informed by the convergence of internal realms and natural landscapes. Elsie’s work translates personal experience, sensory memory of place and deep feeling into expressive visual forms that evoke both intimacy and expansiveness.

Through painting, Elsie abstracts and emphasises the light and shapes found in the natural landscape. Elsie’s work conveys both familiarity and mystery. Elsie recognises that attuning to the land she work on allows elements of wind, water, light, movement and darkness to speak. Likewise, finding an inner spaciousness and awareness of feeling allows those feelings to become visual terrain.

Born in Western Australia, Elsie has travelled and lived across many places in so-called Australia. Elsie has spent the last 6 years living and working in the Central and Western desert, interspersed with stints of coastal reset time. Elsie is an artist, community development practitioner and arts centre worker. She acknowledges that First Nations peoples are the original, continuing and expert artists and custodians of Country.