Artist Statement
My art aims to help us slow down because that is when we feel most connected to our environment, our bodies, and each other. I do that by making intricately detailed weavings and prints that invite a mood of quiet playfulness. Using layered color, text, and woven patterns, I build complex pieces that encourage careful looking. They hover between pictorial and abstract, dissolving in and out of focus.
Weaving, printmaking, and embroidery are the traditions I work within. They connect me to community and place, and their labor is mischievously time-consuming. These processes offer a slowness that deepens my tolerance for doubt. Slowness leads to entaglement, connectedness.
I was raised on a homestead in Nebraska, so I grew up close to nature. Childhood eye disease deepened this attachment. I savored my remaining eyesight by reverently observing the prairie landscape: the horizon, dusk colors, animal structures. My artistic practice continues this kind of wonder-scrutiny. With my good eye, I zoom in on fragments of landscape; my blind eye is where mystery alchemizes.
Left-right symbolism, rooted in the body's perceptual systems, allows me to playfully challenge binary thinking. My work offers an alternative to the hurried duality of capitalism that pressures us to simplify, categorize, separate ourselves from nature and each other.
Elysia Mann is a Resident Artist at Relay Ridge in Knoxville, Tennessee. She works as the 2D Studio Manager in the School of Art at the University of Tennessee where she got her MFA. Her BFA is from Washington University in St. Louis. Recent exhibitions include the solo show Long Long Game Game at the Georgetown College Galleries and Holding Pattern at the KMAC Museum and TSA Greenville. Her studio practice is informed by the natural beauty of the places she has lived including the Nebraska prairie, Florida’s forgotten coast, and the mountains of southern Appalachia.
