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Untitled Statement

My installations are collages.
My walls are pieces of paper.
To collage is to make and repair breaks between images.
To collage is to split and to fuse.
My installations draw disparate pieces together into an interrelated whole.
My installations break up wholes and scatter them outward in disparate pieces.
My installations involve the gaps between works in order to get at the gaps in communication that riddle human relationships.
In my relationships, my desire for total intimacy often competes with my fear of annihilation.
I combat this fear by insisting on the possibility of being both one thing and two things, one person and two people– and all the while being myself.
I often trawl the scrap bins beside the table saw and the laser printer, looking for interesting byproducts of unknown projects.
When I hang a cardboard stencil on the wall, I make an offcut whole.
When I layer stencils in a drawing, I slash a whole into a pile of offcuts.
When I cut out a drawing, its shape becomes as important as what it represents.
My abstract works are composite bodies, just like the literal figures.
Cartoonist Julie Doucet’s comics often follow a character named “Julie Doucet.” I find this a better framework for my practice of drawing myself than the art-historical tradition of self-portraiture.
I work not with “the” abstract body but with my own legs, hands, and arms, like an actor or a dancer.
The image of the brush as an extension of the artist’s arm verges on cliche, but there’s truth in it. I rely on my tools almost as much as I rely on my glasses.
I need to know the scale of myself in order to know the scale of other things.
The question of scale reveals the limits of drawing.
Drawings need to be larger than life in order to appear life size.

© 2026 by Elia Smith