MEET ELIZA STEPHENS: THINKING THROUGH IMAGES
Aldeburgh is home to filmmaker, photographer, restaurateur and artist Eliza Stephens. She runs Thai Street Café and DP’s Bar, makes films with SCC and draws inspiration from Suffolk life, its landscape and nature.
“I love living in Suffolk. The coast, landscape, wildlife and people are all part of my life here. Food and art might seem like different worlds, but for me they’re all about curiosity and telling stories.”
– Eliza Stephens
From Aldeburgh to AI
After working in television, Eliza moved further into photography and visual art. Today, alongside running her Aldeburgh businesses and working behind the camera with SCC, she is undertaking a PhD at the University of Suffolk and has expanded her practice from photography to AI generated imagery.
Her AI work is now reaching a wider audience. This summer she is exhibiting at Britten Pears Arts’ Summer Contemporary at Snape Maltings, where one of her AI-generated works has already sold. Her practice is also taking her further afield through AVEVA Creativity × AI programme in Cambridge and an exhibition of her work in China.
Thinking through images
Eliza’s Phantom Mirror project grew from deeply personal experiences of dementia and caregiving. Through a methodology she calls AI Phototherapy, she uses an ongoing dialogue with generative AI to explore memory, grief and recognition.
“I don’t see myself as a prompt engineer telling a machine what to make. I’m more of a navigator, following the images until something appears that I recognise or understand differently.”
– Eliza Stephens
About Eliza’s work
Rather than beginning with a finished idea, Eliza generates, rejects, changes and responds to images. She describes the process as thinking through images, with the artist acting as a navigator rather than sole author.
That thinking is now expanding into local and international communities, where she is exploring connections between technology, infrastructure, landscape and everyday human life.
Back in Suffolk
From Thai Street Café and DP’s Bar in Aldeburgh to filmmaking, experimental AI imagery and international projects, Eliza’s world is unusually varied. But Suffolk, its people, landscape and nature remain a constant source of inspiration.
For all the new technology, her work remains interested in something distinctly human: people, memory, experience and the stories images can tell.