Eliza Box
A collage, illustration & mixed media artist living on my little farm in Cornwall.
WHO AM I?
I’m Eliza Box. I’m a collage and mixed media artist living on a small farm in Cornwall.
I was born and raised in South Africa, and my work explores memory, identity, and the layered space between where we come from and where we feel we belong.
Now, as a mother raising boys, that work has deepened. It’s no longer just about what I’ve inherited, but what I’m passing on. The pressure is quiet, constant, and often invisible. There’s a weight to holding everything, motherhood, feminism, softness, responsibility and still finding room to grow.
Cornwall has become a kind of anchor for me. I’ve lived across Britain, but here I felt something click like the land remembered me. Maybe it’s ancestral. Maybe it’s instinct.
Through collage, I piece together memory and experience cutting, layering, listening. My art is how I hold both the beauty and the burden. It’s my way of showing up for the parts of myself that were silenced, and for the kind of future I want my children to help create.
Collage gives me a way to piece together what I’ve carried, what I’ve hidden, and what I still hope to find.
Artist Statement
Eliza Box is a collage and silkscreen artist whose practice explores the layered experience of identity, belonging, and soft resistance. Born and raised in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa during the dismantling of apartheid, and now living in rural Cornwall, her work is shaped by two strikingly different landscapes one vivid, loud, and formative; the other soft, slow, and quietly ancestral.
Her ongoing series Past. Present. Potential. reflects on what it means to live between cultures, times, and selves. Through hand-cut collage, illustration, mixed media, and symbolic animal forms, she creates work that sits between memory and imagination drawing from her South African childhood and her life as an adult and mother in Cornwall. These pieces act as gentle excavations: tracing what is inherited, what is held, and what is quietly being transformed.
Nature plays a central role in her practice. The rhythm of wildflowers, stone, and shifting skies guides the pace and texture of her work. Flowers appear often not just for their beauty, but as symbols of camouflage and soft defiance. Behind petals and patterns lie themes of hiding, containment, vulnerability, and the quiet power of becoming visible again.
Through collage, Eliza mirrors the way identity forms: layered, shifting, never fixed. Her process is intuitive and reflective cutting, assembling, and allowing fragments to find their place. Motherhood threads through every piece, as does the weight of privilege, the ache of cultural in-betweenness, and the instinctive pull toward wildness.
At its heart, her work is about integration. It holds space for contradiction and connection for migration, memory, ancestry, and the slow, lifelong process of becoming whole. It is a quiet conversation between past and present, between the inner child and the adult self. A way of asking:
What do I carry forward? What do I return to? And what happens when I stop hiding, and start growing wild again?