Artist is based in: Sweden
Elis Essinger is an artist whose practice explores the friction between personal experience and public systems. Shaped by encounters with government and healthcare structures—queues, forms, waiting, and resistance—Essinger investigates the vibrations that arise between definitions and shifting boundaries.
Working primarily with sampled material from public institutions such as logotypes, icons, sounds, and instructional imagery, Essinger transforms these familiar yet impersonal elements into new visual languages. Recent projects have focused on government identities and hospital protocols, which, when removed from their original context, lose their function and take on new, often ornamental or iconographic qualities.
Essinger’s work moves in the space where the personal and the bureaucratic collide—where encounters can be both supportive and alienating, rational and chaotic. Their process combines digital and craft-based methods, including laser cutting, wood carving, carpentry, and metalwork. In this interplay of mechanical precision and manual labor, Essinger highlights the dual presence of the systematic and the personal embedded in material form.