Elana Manti
Peace Offering (Talk to Me Nicely), 2026
Coloured pencil on heavyweight paper, fixed onto mounted wooden panels
Dimensions variable
Artist statement
That you continue to recognize your face as your own is nothing more than a formality. Experientially and existentially, your face has detached itself from the sense of being your own. (Dylan Trigg, Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety, p. 65).
Peace Offering (Talk to Me Nicely) is grounded in phenomenology - focusing on somatic experience and perception. Evaluating anxiety as a bodily energy; something physically endured before it can be verbalised or rationalised. Through drawing, I fragment the body to visualise the paroxysm of anxiety, wherein an individual physically experiences such emotions as a depersonalising force where the body becomes unfamiliar and awareness turns inward.
Photographs: Anna Kucera
Acknowledgement of Country
UNSW School of Art & Design stands on an important place of learning and exchange first occupied by the Bidjigal and Gadigal peoples.
We acknowledge the Bidjigal and Gadigal peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land that our students and staff share, create and operate on. We pay our respects to Elders past and present and extend this respect to all First Nations peoples across Australia. Sovereignty has never been ceded.
