Elliott Flanagan is a multimedia artist, writer and curator, unpicking class and masculinity through his own experiences of growing up in Burnley, being a footballer, a Club 18-30 rep, a salesman. Navigating an unease around class in the art world, he interrogates how to be taken seriously while escaping definition, being careful and the big question of whether to give them what they want.

The discomfort that permeates his relationship with the art world draws him back time and again to themes of class, representation, art and the strata within what defines working class culture & identity. Fundamental to his work are beliefs in the autodidactic nature of his community, curiosity, ideas of growing with your class, ambition, an attraction to European glamour, political engagement and furthering oneself intellectually. Rooted in the transcendental and in the transformative realism of the everyday, Flanagan seeks sublime moments found in local communities and cultures. He is interested in our relationship with so called high and low culture, playing with its categories: it is all one thing, it can all be together.

His current work revisits a seminal time working a summer job as a Club 18-30 rep. Acknowledging negative media stories depicting young Brits’ excessive drunkenness, sexual permissiveness and its amoral, unfashionable history, Flanagan offers up this world as a ticket away from suffocating small town life. Travel, paradise, beauty, new people, Greek gods, an opportunity of self-discovery and metamorphosis. 

Flanagan has worked with Venture Arts, A Modest Show and has exhibited nationally and internationally including Tate Liverpool, Baltic Gateshead, HOME and Venice Biennale. He is Curatorial Associate for Wales in Venice 2026.