"I am an unreliable narrator of my own life."

Nelson is a London-based artist working primarily in film and hand embroidery—a practice inherited from a long line of women in her family who worked as machinists in Northern England’s textile industry during the 1980s. By reclaiming this matrilineal craft, she transforms the domestic into the political. Her works are sculptural paintings: layered, padded, stitched, and unapologetically feminine.

Drawing from horror films, family mythologies, and the mess of memory, Nelson’s work lives in the space between personal history and collective trauma. Her daughter often appears in her films and stitched pieces, threading her maternal identity directly into the work. She invites the monstrous in—exploring hauntings, doubling, and the sticky boundaries between past and present, self and other. Her practice is autotheoretical, using lived experience—embellished, imperfect, unresolved—as a lens to challenge the sanitised tropes of femininity in Western culture.

Nelson’s work has shown internationally, including a 2023 screening at Tate Modern’s Tate Late, a broadcast on Montez Press Radio, and exhibitions with Woman Made Gallery in Chicago. She was awarded the Homiens Art Prize in 2024, the Batsford Prize in 2022, and the Seen Mentor Prize by curator Carrie Scott in 2025. Her work was recently featured in Emerging Yorkshire Artists at Craven Museum (shortlisted for Museum of the Year 2024), where she is currently undertaking a month-long solo exhibition and residency. Her writing has appeared in publications including the peer-reviewed art journal JAWS.