Mandarin Duck Falls

Mandarin Duck Falls is the first in a series of tondo paintings, the circular format echoing the aircraft window through which Elliott spent over two decades watching the landscape unfold below. Framed by this familiar shape, each painting reflects a way of seeing that is fleeting, partial and always in motion.

This work began not with a place she had visited, but with a story. During a flight, a Chinese cabin crew colleague spoke about a waterfall near her childhood home. The conversation stayed with Elliott long after the journey had ended, becoming less a memory of words than a vivid sense of place.

The painting is not an attempt to depict that landscape, but to imagine it. Layers of colour, texture and gesture build a place shaped by listening, memory and distance—a landscape carried from one person to another before finding its own form in paint. The tondo holds this imagined world much like an aircraft window: offering a glimpse that is intimate, fleeting and never quite complete.