Statement & Biography

My work begins with lived experience and expands outward toward our shared humanity.

I use photography, sculpture, installation, drawing, and painting (whatever the work requires) to explore the conditions of being human, where body, psyche, memory, and spirit intersect.

My practice is inspired by moments of joy, pain, and loss. Each body of work begins with pieces of evidence left behind after experiences of transformation and personal evolution. I am drawn to what intrigues me: sometimes an object, an image, a fragment of the body, a memory, or a fleeting moment. I stay with it until it reveals something larger. Ideas unfold, inform, revisit, and expand one another, creating an evolving network of connections across my practice—what I think of as the art of personal mythology.

I believe that great art stirs mystery and memory. My continuing goal is to create public and private spaces of reflection where contradictions coexist, connections are made, and meaning remains open.

Biography

Fierce and vulnerable, Elyse Defoor shares her inner and outer responses to the world through her art in an ongoing search for connection—to ourselves, to one another, and to our shared humanity. Her work searches for beauty and meaning within complexity, holding space for both tenderness and danger, grief and grace, mystery and memory.

A native Southerner (b. Greenville, SC, 1952) Defoor lives and works in Atlanta. For more than three decades, she has worked across photography, sculpture, installation, drawing, and painting, following what intrigues and inspires her.

Much of Defoor’s art begins in lived experience, particularly moments of joy, pain, grief, loss, and transformation. Working with the idea of “pieces of evidence left behind,” wedding dresses, bathing suits, bullet casings, knives, switch plates and other familiar things become vehicles through which private experience expands into larger questions about vulnerability, identity, love, violence, memory, and resilience.

Her bodies of art form an evolving network of ideas. Themes and images return, intersect, and transform across time. At the heart of her practice is the desire to create work that touches people. She creates spaces where viewers recognize something of themselves and feel less alone.

Defoor studied at the University of Georgia and the Atlanta College of Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in collections including MOCA GA and the New York Public Library. She is a Fellow of the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Video documentation of “Elyse Defoor–Slivers of Time,” “Loss. Redemption. Grace,” “Uncloaked,” “Unbridled,” “all of us, alone” and her “Relics of Marriage” outdoor installation, along with exhibition tours may be viewed on Elyse Defoor–YouTube and on this website’s Podcasts & Videos page.