I'm Eliza Box, a collage, mixed media and illustration artist based in Cornwall.
I was born and raised in South Africa and moved to Britain as a young adult. Living between cultures has shaped the way I see the world and continues to influence my work.
Much of my practice begins with questions of memory, belonging and identity. Motherhood has become central to what I make. Raising children has made me think differently about inheritance, responsibility and the stories we pass on.
I work primarily with hand-cut collage, combining animals, flowers and found imagery to create layered visual narratives. These pieces often sit somewhere between memory and imagination, exploring what it means to carry multiple versions of ourselves at once.
I live on a small farm in Cornwall, where the landscape, wildlife and rhythm of rural life increasingly find their way into my work. I have truly loved finding nature again, discovering her textures, colours and smells.
Collage gives me a way to piece together what I’ve carried, what I’ve hidden, and what I still hope to find.
My work is not a declaration of belonging.
It's a quiet attempt to find it.
ELIZA BOX
I work under the artist name Eliza Box. Eliza is the name I give to my inner artist child, the creative part of me who loved cutting, arranging, and making things long before adulthood and responsibility took centre stage. Working under this name allows me to create with curiosity, instinct, and playfulness.
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?