SKROV / Tersa Bruta

Art Cover Story

Nicole Elkins has spent eight months linking soda cans by hand. Accumulation. Duration. The boundary between maker and material dissolves until the distinction no longer holds. SKROV, her first international exhibition is on show at HUD Space until April 19th. We chose her before the world caught up, because that is exactly when it matters. The work she makes under the name TERSA BRUTA carries consequence. Bone suspended inside open steel. Bird spikes reversed into spinal structure, puncturing the hands that built them. SKROV holds two meanings: the hull that carries a body through pressure and the carcass left once life has passed through. Elkins builds inside that contradiction: where refinement and rawness are the same force, arriving from opposite directions.

Your background runs through atelier and production — Oscar de la Renta, Helmut Lang, Ralph Lauren. Garment construction is about making something that fits a body, moves with it, contains it. Your sculptures don’t dress bodies — they become them. When did the logic of construction stop being about clothing and start being about anatomy?

The logic never left the body. It went inward. In fashion, construction negotiates surface, fit, movement: how something meets the body, how it holds, how it responds to tension and gravity. Those same concerns are still present in the work, but they’re no longer resolved externally. They operate as internal architecture now. I come from fashion and it’s a strong part of who I am, but I don’t have interest at this stage in dressing a body. What I found myself drawn to was building the conditions that allow a body to exist, to hold under pressure, to remain intact through strain. The origin of TERSA BRUTA actually came from the atelier itself, from discarded trims, damaged samples, fabrics that had been written off. I became obsessed with what they could become if given the opportunity to transform. The logic is the same: tension, weight, connection. What changed is where those forces live and how they’re made visible.

TERSA BRUTA. In Italian, bruta means ugly. Raw, rough, unwanted. You chose that as your name. Is that a reclamation, a warning, or something else entirely?

It’s not a reclamation. It’s a position. I’ve always been drawn to things most people would find ugly, raw, even a little disturbing, and I love a walking contradiction. I find plenty of them in myself. Tersa comes from the Latin for something refined, reduced to its essential form. Bruta holds onto resistance, roughness, what hasn’t been resolved. That tension is the work. I’m not interested in refinement that removes force, or rawness that loses control. The work exists between those two conditions, where precision and resistance are held at the same time. There’s constant pressure in the fashion and art worlds to smooth things over, make them more accessible, more palatable. I’m more interested in what happens when you resist that without losing clarity. I push myself to extremes and I have no fear of imperfection. That had to be a core principle, not just of the work but of what I call myself.

Your last body of work read differently, more defensive, more closed. SKROV feels like something shifted. What broke open?

What ruptured was my definition of strength. Earlier work relied on defense: distance, protection, control. Strength meant keeping something out or contained. But that structure stopped holding. Not suddenly, through sustained pressure over time. What was built to protect started functioning as confinement. I had to find ways to break through the comfort I’d constructed, both in the work and in myself. A lot of it came from recognizing a pattern in my own mind, always being on the defense before vulnerability or harm could reach me. I finally decided to get out of my own way. The shift is really visible when you compare the two bodies of work: SKROV is open in a way that the previous layerings of metal, leather, barbed wire, wax, cording never were. Those were coverings. This is exposure. Hold Me was the piece that broke something open. I started thinking of myself as part of the material, the bone suspended inside the cube, held by wire I knew could snap. People assume the spine is the point of the piece, but it can just as easily be read as a heart or a brain. Something vital, something that keeps you functioning, suspended inside a structure that looks like a cage but isn’t closing around it. The cube is open. It’s holding without containing. That realization shifted something in how I understood what I was making across the whole body of work: protection doesn’t have to mean enclosure. The cage becomes the backbone. That’s not a metaphor I planned. It arrived through the making of it.

SKROV holds two meanings at once: the hull that carries a body through pressure, and the carcass left once life has moved on. Where does vulnerability live in this exhibition, if at all?

Moving from hull to carcass was a natural shift, a personal evolution of letting go of what was holding me back. Protection, being closed off, being too afraid to try or to be seen. I’m a private person. I don’t let many people in and I don’t tolerate bullshit. I can be a bit of an attack dog if I feel disrespected or betrayed. But I’ve come to understand that things look different when you allow yourself to actually be vulnerable. Focusing inward, healing parts of past versions of myself, that’s what’s pushing me toward where I need to go. In terms of hull to carcass: the only way out is through. The carcass isn’t an endpoint, it becomes the material for the hull. What remains after exposure: bone, fragment, residue. It’s not symbolic, it’s reorganized into structure. What once marked the absence of protection is used to construct it. The joins are visible. The materials retain their capacity to resist, to catch, to mark. The structure holds, but it does not seal. I’ve never thought of vulnerability as softness. It’s a structure formed from what has already been opened. You have to endure it, move through it, learn to hold it with some grace.

Showing inside HUD Space, whose name translates to skin. That alignment feels too precise to be accidental. Did the space find you, or did you find each other? How much does the architecture of where work lives change what the work means?

It was accidental, but the connection was immediate and impossible to ignore. The introduction came through my dear friend Undine Markus of New Arrivals, who helped produce the exhibition. Once I understood that HUD translates to skin, it felt exact. Skin was already central to the work, not as surface but as a system shaped by pressure, repetition, and time. HUD is run by Siri von Bothmer, together with Jonas Eriksson, and it’s not a neutral space. It’s not a traditional gallery, and that felt right for where I am in my practice right now. I love how she lets different types of creativity intertwine or stand completely alone. The soda can bottom quilt was developed specifically for the space. It acts as a surface in direct contact with it, becomes one with the internal architecture of HUD. The architecture determines how a body moves through it, and in this case, how a single word, skin, opens into multiple meanings depending on what it contains.

Deer vertebrae, “not as ornament but as structural truth: what persists once vulnerability has passed.” What does the vertebra do structurally in the work? And what does it do psychologically for you and for the viewer?

The vertebra is not symbolic. It’s structural. It holds the body. Carries weight over time. Allows movement without collapse, but it’s never fully secure. It’s both strong and fragile, responsible for everything while remaining exposed. Placed within a more rigid system, it interrupts abstraction and pulls the work back to the body. It introduces support that is precise, necessary, and always at risk. In Hold Me, I think of myself as the vertebrae. The wiring that suspends it is my trust in myself. I know it could snap. The steel cube is a higher form of me, holding me in place, telling me I’m protected without needing layers, without additional material. It’s contained and suspended at the same time. Still vulnerable, but held.

You source bone fragments, materials already used up by something else. What is your philosophy on what they carry: memory, history, prior life? And how does that differ from working with metal, wax, industrial remnants?

Bone carries prior structure. It held weight, functioned as support, existed inside a living system. Industrial material carries a different kind of history: production, repetition, consumption, disposal. It’s shaped by process rather than growth. I’m not interested in separating those conditions. I think they work in a strange harmony. The body doesn’t exist outside of either system. Bone and metal aren’t opposites, they’re parallel structures, one biological, one manufactured. The work lives where they meet, where the distinction between them starts to collapse.

The statement says materials enter the work through the artist’s own body. Explain that literally. What enters you, what passes through, what stays?

The material is processed twice. First through consumption: the cans pass through my body as part of a daily system, mine and my partner’s, eight months of water, beer, soda. Then they’re processed again through labor: hand cut, punched, each ring linked one at a time. What results is not neutral material. It has already moved through intake and residue before it becomes structure. It carries a prior use, then a second transformation. Consumption and construction collapse into the same system. I spent a lot of time alone in the studio building Obsessive Consumption I. Sometimes with no music. I’d let my thoughts move and come back to me in resolution or just fall away. I physically and mentally poured myself into it and felt myself change through the making of it.

Where in this collection would you place your own bone, hair, nails, matter from your own body? What would it express that the sourced materials cannot?

Hair holds memory. As someone who has cycled through various hair colors over the past decade, it became an interesting way to hold onto former versions of myself. That bag of hair has traveled across many apartments, waiting for me to let it into the practice. Hair is sacred, and there’s something compelling about incorporating yourself in a more literal way without it becoming too macabre. For now. My own body is already embedded in the process through repetition, duration, consumption, physical labor. The materials aren’t passive. They resist, press back, make contact. If the work continues beyond me, I’d consider integrating my own bone, not as a gesture, but as a final alignment. My sister has been given clear instructions in case that ever becomes possible.

Most contemporary art practice tries to erase the hand. You leave it in, literally. The metal can catch skin. That’s not incidental, that’s a decision. What are you refusing when you refuse to smooth the edges?

Smoothing is erasure. It perfects away the labor, removes the evidence of how something came to exist. Edges hold information. They mark where a material resisted or where it was transformed. Take that away and the work becomes passive. Some of these materials were designed to deter or injure. Backbone I is built from industrial bird spikes, objects whose original function is to prevent contact. I use them to reverse that logic, to redirect it into a new system where I become the vulnerable one rather than something to be deterred. While building the spinal structure, the material punctured my hands repeatedly. I wasn’t trying to avoid that. It’s part of how the work is understood, part of how the original use gets shifted. And just like the human body, these pieces aren’t perfect. There are nicks, broken links, misspacing. The bones had a mind of their own and were genuinely hard to tame. I don’t mind that. Imperfection is a way of letting things go, of not holding on so tightly. Perfection is boring. People need to sit with flaws from time to time. They could learn a lot about themselves if they did.

Chainmail panels made from hand-linked soda tabs. What happens to your mind in that process? Is there something you can only access through that kind of duration?

The work requires time in a completely literal way. It’s built through accumulation, not gesture. Every connection depends on the one before it. There’s no shortcut that doesn’t alter the structure. The soda can bottom quilt took over eight months. That duration is not incidental, it’s part of how the work forms. The repetition borders on masochistic. The body adapts, becomes a kind of machine, repeating the same action until something emerges. There’s something regressive in it too, a return to hand work that is direct and necessary. Not efficient, not optimized, but continuous. I’m not looking for a moment of satisfaction at the end. The work exists inside the process. Over time the boundary between me and the material shifts, and then it disappears entirely.

“I’m not looking for a moment of satisfaction at the end. The work exists inside the process.”

The exhibition is built around organic logic, natural systems, body parts, residue. So what is the argument for aluminum and metal? Why the industrial alongside the anatomical?

The body is already industrial. It exists within systems of consumption, production, and waste. Aluminum makes that visible. It introduces repetition, modularity, a logic of scale that belongs to manufacturing. Bone and metal aren’t opposites, they’re different conditions of the same structural problem. The work operates exactly where those systems intersect.

Fashion appears in your work not as aesthetic vocabulary but as structural methodology. Was that a conscious position, or just how your hands already knew to work?

It began in the hands. Working in ateliers and production teaches you to think through construction: where something pulls, where it fails, how it distributes weight, how it moves while staying intact. That knowledge is physical before it’s conceptual. I’m not interested in directly referencing fashion. It’s inherently in me and in the work, and people with an industry-trained eye can see the synergy without it being too obvious or literal. To reference it directly would reduce it to surface, turn it into a reference rather than a tool. I use it as structural intelligence. The body here isn’t styled. It’s constructed.

There is something almost romantic in this exhibition, beauty inside hard, sharp, raw things. Where does that come from?

What reads as beautiful here isn’t separate from what’s difficult. It comes from proximity, from being close to something that could resist or mark you. There’s no softness without tension. It’s an alluring kind of beauty, not applied, not decorative. It’s not about contrast between hard and soft. It’s about how something is held without being resolved, how a kind of stability forms within what is severe. Rawness asks for contact without distance, without protection.

The final line of the statement: “a body learning to trust itself again.” Again. What did it have to unlearn first?

Control. For me it was never abstract, it was personal. Don’t let people in. Get on the offense before anyone can get close. Build enough layers that nothing can reach you. I thought that was strength for a long time. What this work forced me to unlearn is that stability doesn’t come from restriction. The cage in Hold Me taught me that. Something can hold you without closing around you. That’s what I’m learning to trust. Not control. Structure. And the difference between the two turns out to be everything.

Where does SKROV sit in your development, not chronologically, but internally? And what do you want to happen to a person when they stand inside it?

It’s a threshold. It feels more internally resolved than anything I’ve made before, but not simplified. The complexity is still there, it’s just held differently. The viewer doesn’t stand outside it. They encounter it physically: weight, tension, exposure, containment, all at once. The body meets the work as another structure inside the same system. That’s what I want, not observation, but encounter.

This is your second solo show, your first international show, and your first major interview. One day you will look back at both from somewhere further. What does that place look like, where do you want to arrive, and what do you want to have built?

I want to arrive at different realizations within my own journey and see how far I can push the juxtaposition between materials, man-made versus organic, industrial versus biological. Occupying larger spaces. Maybe collaborations in the fashion realm with like-minded designers, transforming a space, a show, creating a feeling that can only exist in that specific moment between the work and the people inside it. The real question I keep coming back to is how far TERSA BRUTA can take itself. Whether it can become an ecosystem, a universe with its own internal logic. I don’t have the answer to that yet. That’s exactly why I’m still making the work.

Stones of Immortality / Michèle Lamy and Barry X Ball

Credits

Artist: Tersa Bruta / @tersabruta
by Nicole Elkins / @nic.elks
Gallery: Hud Space / @hud_space
Photography:  Amelie Karlsbro / @amelie.karlsbro
Editors: Anca Macavei, Maria Abramenko / @ancamacavei @mariabramenko
Editorial Assistant: Ethel Romero / @_bby_ella_

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