Art has always been a constant companion in my life, a language I’ve relied on to process, decode, and navigate the complexities of my inner and outer worlds. Through a deeply personal and emotional lens, my work takes form as surrogates for lived experiences. They often appear whimsical or childlike at first glance, but beneath their charming surfaces lie layered stories of vulnerability, memory, and transformation. These works are not just aesthetic objects; they function as emotional containers: holding the things I once felt I had to hide.
As a child (and sometimes as an adult), I was labeled as "too sensitive" or "overly emotional." Because of this, I internalized the need to compress or sanitize my feelings to make them more palatable to others. Now, through my art, I give those once suppressed emotions permission to exist fully and without apology. My pieces serve as vessels for these unruly feelings - messy, joyful, painful, and everything in between. The sweetness in my work is not meant to distract from the darker content, but to hold it gently, to disarm it, and to reveal its complexity. I think of it as weaponizing cuteness. The cuteness becomes a tool and strategy to confront the discomfort that vulnerability often brings.
My practice spans clay, fiber, sculpture, digital manipulation, and screenprinting. I’m particularly drawn to the use of secondhand materials—not only for their environmental implications, but for the traces of memory and history embedded within them. There is something quietly radical about giving discarded things a second life, and it echoes the emotional work of reclaiming parts of the self that were once overlooked or denied.
Sewing is an especially significant element of my practice, as a skill passed down from my mother and one of my earliest creative languages. It connects me to family, tradition, and care. I often pair soft, intimate materials like fabric and fiber with harder mediums like ceramic and sculptural armatures. This tension between hard and soft, delicate and durable, fragile and forceful mirrors the emotional landscapes I explore. Through this push and pull, I investigate how form can reflect the contradictions of tenderness and protection, joy and grief, resilience and rupture.
Digital illustration and photo manipulation also appear in my work, adding layers of dreamlike imagery and dissonance. These hybrid methods allow me to blur boundaries between the physical and the digital, the real and the imagined, the present and the remembered.
By merging the whimsical with the profound, I aim to create spaces where viewers can access their own vulnerability. In softening the sharp edges of pain through visual delight, I hope to remind people that strength and sensitivity are not opposites, but are deeply intertwined.
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. When she’s not in her studio, Electra serves as the “Artist-in-Residence” at Relume, a woman-owned home goods and accessories brand based in Washington, DC, where she brings her playful, emotional sensibility to collaborative product and design work. She also works as a Museum Assistant at the Corcoran, staying connected to contemporary art discourse and supporting the creative community around her.
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