ELISE VAZELAKIS Artist Statements

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My process of loom weaving follows a long-tended tradition, although my integration of metal wire pushes the customary limits of weaving. Manipulating the woven wire creates dynamic forms of undulating gestures and punctuated patterning that subvert weaving’s static templates. My work strikes a balance between textile and sculpture that explores a juxtaposition of comfort and complexity, fortitude and fragility.

This research-based fiber sculpture is informed by my concern for the environment and desire to highlight the impact plastic has on the ocean. My work with my plastic refuse is an investigation of the aesthetic possibilities using non-traditional materials with traditional fiber techniques. The collection of my consumer waste is hidden by the natural fibers that are crocheted, knitted, or wrapped with loom woven fabric.

Over a three month period I have collected and transformed my single use plastic trash in order to become informed of my personal usage and to raise awareness about the degradation of the marine ecosystem due to plastic. Documentation was a large part of the project. Each time I collected a piece of debris I would photograph, log, date and describe each item. It made me aware on a daily basis how much plastic I usually throw away or recycle.

The materials that I have used to camouflage the plastic waste are all undyed, natural fibers sourced locally. Typical fibers such as acrylics, nylon, and polyester are a type of plastic and derived from crude oil that is not biodegradable. Also, synthetic dyes are detrimental to the environment. With this in mind, the materials I have used are undyed or naturally colored cotton or wool sourced from local farms where the animals are treated humanly.

My hope with this fiber sculpture is to raise awareness about climate change through a positive means while conveying a serious message about the degradation of the marine ecosystem due to plastic.

"The Present Moment of the Past” is an installation that merges my affinity for working

with textile materials with the proposition of a site-specific installation that visually

conveys the experience of time. The passing of time is usually thought of as linear,

however this installation serves as a visual metaphor for the ways that memories

convolute and warp our perception of time.

The sole material used in the installation is metallic gold thread representing life's most

valuable commodity: time. This delicate medium communicates how time is fragile,

elusive, finite and precious. As the cascading thread emerges and dissolves, it becomes

a visual barometer of how time is always present, yet often unseen and slips away.

The fourteen cones of thread are hung by monofilament across the gallery, enabling the

70,000 yards of thread to fall freely off the spools and cascade to the ground. At times

the thread moves slowly, in other moments quickly, and periodically it stands still and

stops all together. The amassed thread on the ground represents the layered memories

that create and distort the perception of time.

This artwork is about the isolation, monotony and chronic stress I have been feeling because of the global pandemic that has plagued us the past year. I feel that it destroyed my sense of time and distorting the shape of my days, weeks and months, sometime condensing time and other times stretching it out. During 2020 I felt like I was in a time warp where everything just stood still. The sense of timelessness made me feel like I was in sort of a purgatorial state. The old adage “the days are long, but the years are short” didn’t hold true for me during this pandemic, “the days were long, and the year was also long.” Without the usual activities that marked and divided the calendar it was harder processing how I experienced time, which has had a profound impact on me. Since the pandemic confined me to my home, it upended my routine and blurred the markers I relied on to keep track of time. And to make matters worse last year wasn’t marked by just one big crisis but a cascade of them: a killer virus with political chaos, racial strife and environmental catastrophes.

Time became an obsession, I tried to distinguished between the time we count and the time we inhabit. Since the normal variety of activities that use to act as time markers were gone I felt like everything bled together into one amorphous blob of days and months. The dictionary defines a time warp as a “discontinuity, suspension or anomaly.” Without breaks in my repetitive routine this year has felt like all three terms were applicable. Creating art resistant to man-made mechanics of time-keeping became important to me.

My current artwork is called “Pandemic Time Warp” and is an installation of 100 feet of 1/4 clear tubing that has been wrapped with black and red 7-ply waxed linen. The wrapping method I used was coiling, typical in traditional basket making. When I was encasing the tubing I would I incorporated written messages underneath expressing how I was feeling at that particular moment.

The methodical wrapping of the tubing mimicked the slow motion way time felt to me. Every coil made marked a moment in time. The rhythmic action felt like a heartbeat, a pulse undetectable except to me. At other moments the twisting of the linen around the tubing seems to capture the grief of the bereave’s mourning ritual of wringing of a handkerchief.

The wrapped portions of the tubing tracked time intervals and represented the way I was feeling, red denoted a neutral or good day and the black was a day I may have been sad, depressed, in pain or low on energy. By leaving a break in the coiling by exposing the clear tubing was my way of imposing an artificial endpoint to each day.

In conjunction with the artwork, I assisted in composing a musical component that would be played while viewing the installation. In collaboration with a musician, the art was data indexed by measuring each segment of the piece and then the information was charted. There were 101 segments of which 50.5 inches were clear and 49.5 inches was the tubing with coiled wax linen. I worked on the coiling as long as I wanted to during the day and then left a random clear segment.

With the information measured from each segment, the musical component was created. The cord structure were proportional to the each of the wrapped and clear length within the art piece (red, clear, black) and the amplitude (magnitude, size volume proportion) of the sound washes were a function of how long the intervals were. The higher frequency washes were red, the bigger booming sounds represented black and everything else was clear.The cord structure gave it movement then another layer on top to give was the

As Luchita Hurtuda says, ““Artwork is a diary. It’s really notes on your living.” I believe that my art is a reflection of the infinite time loop we are experiencing during this pandemic as well as a diary of my feelings during this turbulent period in history. My memories were time-stamped to retain some semblance of sequence, or chronological order of my life. Through this art I have created a language that speaks to the me of the way I am experiencing time.

My wire sculptures start with the same loom weaving technique I use in my woven large-scale, wall-bound pieces. They combine the matrix base inherent in weaving, but profoundly diverge from the grid pattern once taken off the loom. I bend, twist and fold the woven pieces into freestanding forms that feel more organic. They are displayed alone or in clusters, hung from the ceiling or positioned on pedestals, which, unlike the wall-bound works, invite circumnavigation. These works have a more pronounced interplay with light and shadow, and their contorted shapes invite viewers to look through and beyond each form.