Keran Elah

Keran Elah Photographer / Visual Storyteller / Artist

I've finally finsihed this magical creature ~ Western Barn Owl Height 42 cm × Width 59.5 cmOil on canvasDM for price
03/01/2026

I've finally finsihed this magical creature ~ Western Barn Owl

Height 42 cm × Width 59.5 cm
Oil on canvas

DM for price

When Nikki Brighton posted this image up of a centipede mother protecting her eggs a few years ago, I fell in love with ...
21/12/2025

When Nikki Brighton posted this image up of a centipede mother protecting her eggs a few years ago, I fell in love with it and felt compelled to paint it. Centipedes have always frightened me, but seeing a mother centipede fiercely protecting her eggs immediately endeared me to them. I love how these mothers hide unassumingly, tucked out of sight, wholly devoted to protecting their offspring. There is something incredibly inspiring in that devotion.
I've finally (after four years) finished this painting and should you want to own it, please let me know.

"The heart has it's own memory"To me the human heart is a living landscape, not only an anatomical object. It's intuitiv...
20/12/2025

"The heart has it's own memory"

To me the human heart is a living landscape, not only an anatomical object. It's intuitive and holds deep wisdom. In this painting the heart is fertile soil and the poppies are acts of survival not decoration.
This is still a work in progress but is available on completion. Please DM if you are interested.

The photos I took through a parabolic solar stove I made (with the help of my school children) with mirror mosaics, capt...
04/08/2025

The photos I took through a parabolic solar stove I made (with the help of my school children) with mirror mosaics, capture the way it fragments and breaks the world into a grid of tiny, distorted images.

I love how chaotic, organic forms are transformed into repeated rhythms and patterns, being both real and abstract at the same time. I especially enjoyed exploring the intersecting worlds of science and art.

Winter GardenFor a very brief time in my early life, a large, lush bush of lemon verbena stood on the boundary of our ga...
16/07/2025

Winter Garden

For a very brief time in my early life, a large, lush bush of lemon verbena stood on the boundary of our garden and our small vegetable patch. The seedlings my mother planted she sheltered with the black plastic cups found at the bottom of 2-liter coke bottles. As a little child I used to love lifting the cups to see the seedlings in their dark, protected caves. Behind the vegetable patch was a giant loquat tree I loved climbing and picking fruit from.

Our garden was tiered with small sloping hills where my brother and I could run and roll down. Firethorn bushes hemmed the hills and blazed with color. Our garden was always a winter garden, or perhaps that was the way I remembered it, icy cold and lost in time. Beyond the garden past the cattle grid and the fence was Umgeni Valley, where zebra and blesbok would graze. Of all the things in our garden I loved the most I remember the tiny flowers that shimmered like geodes in the sunlight, and I often wondered how something so perfect could exist. My mother would steep lemon verbena leaves in boiling water and make tea for us. Sometimes I crush a leaf of lemon verbena between my fingers to remember our winter garden, to try and bring it back to life.

Writing excerpt for Finuala Dowling
24 June 2023
Photo: Snowdrops in the morning mist

I had fun playing with these old photos Bernie was throwing out. They were snapshots of a trip he took with a group of f...
29/06/2025

I had fun playing with these old photos Bernie was throwing out. They were snapshots of a trip he took with a group of friends. I've transformed the faces in the images into tiny portals opening into imagined inner landscapes. The images explore themes of memory and absence , where something "forgotten" or "cut out" is not lost but replaced with something newly imagined. Through reconstructing these moments, the memories become fluid and alive. When memories dissappear, they leave new spaces where light and dreamlike landscapes can fill them. By cutting away, I'm not erasing, but revealing what is hidden beneath.

This image started as a portrait I took of a friend many years ago. I stitched into the original photo using red thread....
25/06/2025

This image started as a portrait I took of a friend many years ago. I stitched into the original photo using red thread. Something about that act felt delicate and surgical, as if i was trying to repair something invisible. The thread carries feelings and ideas of wound, memory, and piecing back together again. I then re-photographed the image in motion, adding movement and blur to soften the outlines. The movement feels a bit disorienting, but it also speaks to transition, to something shifting and alive. I wanted it to stay dreamlike, where identity isn’t lost but is transitioning, refusing to be put in a box or defined too easily.

This image was taken from an older series of work and overlayed with a spore print and I really like the outcome.Mushroo...
16/06/2025

This image was taken from an older series of work and overlayed with a spore print and I really like the outcome.

Mushrooms have always felt deeply connected to death and decay, but also to aliveness and quiet transformation.The spore print layered over the body in a fetal, womb-like pose, says somethimg about how vulnerable and fragile we are in the face of lifes natural cycles.

To me spore prints also have an eye-like symmetry to them, which adds a sense of "seeing" or "being seen", or perhaps something even deeper, like the consciousness of nature. The figure curled inside the iris of the spore print feels held in a gaze. But whose gaze is it...

I've been keeping my eye on a rain-spiders nest for the last month and noticed a few days ago that it was covered in tin...
14/01/2021

I've been keeping my eye on a rain-spiders nest for the last month and noticed a few days ago that it was covered in tiny exoskeletons... which means hundreds of new little rain- spiders and... which also means, new materials for a nature art work!

This image was pieced together solely out of the exoskeletons of the baby spiders, silk web and bits of wood and grass that protected the eggs for the duration of their time in the nest.

On Foot I Wandered Through the Solar SystemsOn footI wandered through the solar systems,Before I found the first thread ...
29/11/2020

On Foot I Wandered Through the Solar Systems

On foot
I wandered through the solar systems,
Before I found the first thread of my red dress.
Already I have a sense of myself.
Somewhere in space my heart hangs,
emitting sparks, shaking the air,
to other immeasurable hearts.

Edith Södergran
trans. Malena Mörling and Jonas Ellerström

Creative photoshoot with my beautiful sister Nicole Bowers at the Views.

©Keran Elah 2020

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Wilderness

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Monday 09:00 - 19:00
Tuesday 09:00 - 19:00
Wednesday 10:30 - 19:00
Thursday 09:00 - 19:00
Friday 10:30 - 19:00
Sunday 09:00 - 19:00

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