✦‎۟ ࣭ ⊹ artist statement ✦‎۟ ࣭ ⊹

The spaces we inhabit between love and resentment, closeness and distance, safety and fear are never fixed. What is soft is never just gentle, what is familiar is never entirely safe. Birthdays are scary. My work exists in these quiet moments where truths reveal themselves.

My practice moves through these tensions, tracing the edges where tenderness meets discomfort and  sweetness veils something more complicated. Through ceramic sculpture, found-object installation, printmaking, and fiber art, I transform the familiar into the unfamiliar, inviting dialogue around the subtle oscillations between the mundane and the uncanny. Working across materials that embody both fragility and endurance, my work examines how memory, materiality, and emotion intersect to tell stories of place, trauma, and transformation.

I’m drawn to opposites not for their contrast, but for their permeability. Hard and soft, durable and delicate, joyful and painful; each relies on the other to exist. The combination of fabric, fiber, and clay allows me to explore this balance materially.

Sewing, a practice passed down from my mother, grounds this work in care, repetition, and inheritance. The act of stitching becomes both repair and reimagining, a way to bind together fragments of memory and emotion. Similarly, I often incorporate found and secondhand materials for the traces of history they carry, using them as vessels to hold what might otherwise remain unseen.

One of my earliest memories happened when I was three or four years old. My twin sister and I both had long blonde hair that reached the smalls of our backs. That meant from behind, you could rarely tell us apart. I remember deciding that the only way to become myself was to cut my long blonde hair off. After everyone went to sleep, I took my mother’s sewing shears and cut my hair above my ears. I hid the strands behind the curtains, convinced that if I couldn’t see them, no one else would either. I woke up with a jagged pixie cut and the sinking feeling that I had done something irreversible. 

That same intuitive scrappiness lives in my work. I sew messily, leaving seams exposed and using red thread that refuses to disappear. I sculpt quickly and without polish. I finish ceramics by dripping glaze with my hands instead of smoothing it away. The work carries the same urgency and risk as that childhood act: an insistence on marking difference, on asserting presence, even if the result is uneven or imperfect.

By merging the whimsical with the profound, I aim to create spaces where vulnerability feels both possible and shared. The work softens sharpness, turning discomfort into something tender. In doing so, it reflects the complexity of being human: that strength and sensitivity are not opposites, but deeply intertwined.

Bio:

Art has always been omnipresent in Electra’s life, often arriving in bursts of chaotic inspiration that occasionally pushed the bounds of acceptable childhood behavior. At age seven, she was famously caught by her mother, a avoid antique collector, attempting to “repair” the inlay of an 18th-century Boulle table using a mallet and craft glue. (Spoiler: Elmer’s is not a recommended restoration material.) Though the technique was questionable, the gesture was, in its own way, heartfelt (and maybe even a little brilliant)

Today, Electra channels that same scrappy, heartfelt energy into a multidisciplinary practice that spans sculpture, painting, fiber, printmaking, and digital manipulation. She gravitates toward secondhand and “once-loved” materials, often sewing, mending, or reimagining objects that carry their own histories. Her work frequently combines tactile softness with structural rigidity, creating a physical and emotional tension that mirrors the messy process of feeling deeply.

Her studio is a patchwork of the sentimental and the strange: stuffed animals awaiting surgery, scraps of fabric with ambiguous past lives, ceramic fragments that didn’t survive the kiln but insist on being included anyway. There’s often a sense of play, but it’s underpinned by something stickier: grief, memory, the need to make sense of complicated feelings. Whether she’s screenprinting a series of tender oddities or building a soft sculpture with hidden weights inside, Electra’s work invites viewers to look closer, laugh a little, and maybe wince with recognition.

Electra is currently an MFA candidate in Fine Arts at George Washington University, where she continues to explore the sweet spot between cuteness and chaos, one patch, stitch, and hand-built piece at a time.