Curation
Where image becomes a way of listening.
Curation, at its best, is not arrangement. It is conversation. Between artists, between images, between the work on the wall and the person standing before it.
My curatorial practice grows from the same root as my coaching and my art: a belief that slowing down and attending carefully to image, symbol, and meaning opens something in us that ordinary language cannot reach. I am drawn to exhibitions that create environments rather than displays. Spaces where a visitor is invited not just to look, but to linger, notice, and be quietly changed by what they encounter.
A Curatorial Practice Rooted in Depth
I curate themed exhibitions that bring contemporary artists into dialogue around shared ideas, imagery, and inner life. Each show begins with a question rather than an answer. A theme that opens rather than closes, that invites multiple readings and unexpected resonances. From there I work closely with artists through every stage: selection, sequencing, installation, and the shaping of spatial narrative. How a room holds and releases attention is as important to me as the individual works within it.
Since 2025 I have served as Art Curator at Illume Gallery, housed within Illume Books in downtown Newburyport, Massachusetts. A space where art, games, and literature share a roof, and where the boundaries between visual and written language naturally dissolve. It is an intimate, thoughtful gallery that attracts artists and visitors drawn to work with depth, meaning, and care.
I conceive and produce all exhibitions, artist receptions, and public programming, and lead all communications across press and social media channels.
ILLUME GALLERY
10 Market Square Newburyport, MA
Philippa Dunn - Oil, Gouache & Colored Pencils - Philippa Dunn draws the natural world with a patience and precision that photography cannot replicate. Trained in Natural Science Illustration at RISD and shaped by a childhood spent across Europe and a life now rooted in New England, her work invites viewers into the subtle textures of everyday nature: the architecture of a petal, the weight of color in a summer bloom, the presence that lives in a moment of genuine attention. Her drawings don't document so much as slow time down, asking the viewer to be still long enough to really see.
Shana Sood – Oil – Shana Sood's paintings explore what it means to carry a place inside you long after you have left it. Originally from New Delhi and now based in the United States, Sood creates portraits shaped by a life lived across cultures, where movement registers slowly, without ever fully settling. Her figures are central and often meet the viewer directly, their stillness charged with quiet tension. Deep reds, radiant yellows, and layered blues evoke both celebration and longing, pigments drawn from memory as much as from observation. What has been left behind returns in fragments, persistent and unresolved, and it is in that unresolved space that Sood's work does its most powerful and intimate work.
Barbara Douglass – Oil and Gouache – Barbara Douglass's paintings ask a quietly radical question: what if self-care were not an indulgence but an act of remembrance? Drawing from mid-century design, classic Americana, and the transcendence of everyday moments, her work uses nostalgic imagery and bold color to reconnect viewers with sensations of warmth, safety, and presence that ordinary life tends to erode. Grounded in traditional realism with a contemporary edge, each piece reaches for something just beneath the surface of the familiar, where comfort feels instinctive rather than earned, and joy arrives not as performance but as return.
Reflections – A Group Exhibition – Offered during the busy holiday season as an invitation to pause, Reflections brought together five artists whose practices, though strikingly different, shared a common quality: stillness. Each artist inhabited her own wall, her own world, and yet the five spoke to one another with quiet fluency. Amy Vander Els worked in encaustic, building luminous layers of beeswax and pigment where forms emerge and recede. Celine McDonald's oils distilled light and landscape into something almost meditative. Elizabeth Lorayne's collagraph prints offered abstract symbols rooted in core values, an invitation to look inward. Kathleen Doyle's watercolor costume sketches revealed the imaginative first breath of theatrical characters not yet born. And Kiki Taron Kinney brought her mixed media and jewelry practice, alive with color, nature, and the joy of making by hand. Together the show created an environment that asked nothing of its visitors except attention. In the middle of December, that was its own kind of gift.
Susan Spellman – Oil and Watercolor – Susan Spellman paints what most of us can only feel. The unspoken emotions that live between gesture and stillness, in the arc of an arm, the pause before a leap, the strength gathering itself just before release. A dancer herself, Spellman brings an insider's understanding to her subject: that dance is not merely performance but a dialogue between body, space, and spirit. Her figures are often placed within constrained spaces and yet press beyond the borders of the canvas itself, as if the painting cannot quite contain the freedom it is trying to hold. With more than 40 illustrated books to her name and decades of teaching drawing and watercolor across the North Shore, Spellman brings to this body of work a lifetime of looking carefully at how movement tells the stories words cannot reach.
Celine McDonald – Oil – Celine McDonald's paintings are the result of sustained, almost meditative attention. Every window, skyline, figure, and turn of light is contemplated, reconsidered, and reconsidered again. Not in search of perfection but in pursuit of a particular quality of stillness. Her work has been described as "hauntingly beautiful," and that phrase captures something true: there is a quality of presence in her paintings that goes beyond technical mastery, a felt sense that something essential has been distilled from the act of looking. A Fellow of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, with exhibitions from New York to Miami to the Berkshires, McDonald brings to Illume Gallery a practice built on the belief that the stillness we seek is always, quietly, seeking us back.
Elizabeth Lorayne – Collagraph Printmaking – In this solo exhibition, Elizabeth Lorayne brought thirty of her forty-eight values-based collagraph prints to the walls of Illume Gallery, alongside five alchemical symbols tracing the stages of inner transformation. At the heart of the show was Animae, a rooted flower first carved in 2019, Latin for "of the soul," representing the core values that guided her own healing journey: creativity, intuition, and courage. Working in her signature collagraph style, each print hand-inked and pulled on her etching press using Charbonnel oil-based inks and Rives BFK cotton paper, Lorayne invited viewers to pause before each symbol and ask: which value calls to you? What does the image stir before the mind steps in? The prints on view became the foundation for Animae: The Source (White Wave Press, 2025), a 48-card values-based deck now used in coaching, therapy, education, and community settings worldwide.
“Elizabeth is a masterful curator with exceptional attention to detail and a deep understanding of the art. She brings care and insight to every installation, making art out of art.”
— Barbara Douglass, ArtistCuratorial Philosophy
I believe exhibitions are not passive. A well-curated show does something to the people who move through it. It shifts perception, opens questions, creates a moment of genuine encounter between the interior world of the artist and the interior world of the viewer.
My curatorial sensibility is shaped by years of working as a printmaker, Jungian-informed coach, and imaginal practitioner. I am interested in art that slows the viewer down. Work that asks something. Work that lingers after you've left the room.
I am particularly drawn to themes that explore the inner life: identity, transition, memory, the natural world as metaphor, the symbolic and the archetypal. Above all I am drawn to artists whose work is made with genuine attention. Where you can feel, in front of the piece, that something real was at stake in the making of it.
Collaborate
I am available for curatorial consultation, exhibition development, and creative programming in collaboration with galleries, cultural institutions, wellness and retreat centers, bookshops, and independent spaces.
If you are an artist seeking curatorial representation or a space looking to develop a meaningful exhibition program, I would love to begin a conversation.