Arts Craft Arts

Feature Artist: Beth Elliott

Sketch (three sides). Beth Elliott, artist

By Gina Malone

Beth Elliott’s career in landscape architecture requires precision. She thinks in terms of geometry. “My expertise is in hardscaping the garden,” she says, “designing the space, the walls, the drainage, anything built in and how it relates to the home. My art is where I can pursue my creations with my own hands and without the precision of architecture.”

Dear One. Beth Elliott, artist

She grew up in Virginia in a family that valued math and science over artistic pursuits, and when the time came she chose to study biochemistry. While doing post-doctorate research on the microscopic architecture inside cells, however, she also felt a pull towards the larger spaces of the natural world, her earliest passion as a child. She decided to go back to school at night to study landscape architecture, not knowing then whether she would even like the field. It turns out she did.

“Landscape architecture has been an incredible merge of creative projects balanced with the precision and organization to get them built,” she says. “I love doing all of those things. I love being outside and I love giving that gift of a serenely designed space to a client and, of course, surrounding as many people as I can with plants.”

She discovered a penchant and a talent for art when taking the prerequisite drawing class required by the landscape architecture program. “It thrilled me that I could draw,” Elliott says. “I remember a self-portrait—that I just knew would be awful because I had never really drawn—turned out to look like me! What an amazing thing to discover. It made me realize that everyone should create; it’s so good to make, to build, to discover, to garden, to tend. Even if you never show a soul, it’s so good for humans to make art. I think humans were meant to create.”

Having discovered that she could create and, what’s more, enjoyed the process, Elliott, true to her sense of spatial organization and design, was drawn to 3-D art: sculpture, at first, then clay. “I found that clay had a lineage, and that teachers passed practices on to their students and mentors,” she says, “and I was hooked on being able to make things with my hands that required learning chemistry and the nuances of clay, and firing. Clay is also something you can only build upon when you are ready, having succeeded at a prior skill with it, and I loved that feeling of accomplishment and challenge.” Her materials include native clay stoneware or porcelain, slips, engobes, wire, wax, wood, thread and cloth.

Spring Thing. Beth Elliott, artist

She moved to Western North Carolina five years ago and that move changed her, she says, “from being more restrained to now using my full art brain, as I call it, without running it through my design brain.” At Odyssey ClayWorks, she found herself among mentors and colleagues who encouraged exploration. “The clay community is a strong community of people who share and seem to genuinely be happy when someone is interested in clay, and it feels great to have discovered this,” she says.

Exploration and letting go of expectations of what might sell and what others might like or expect to see opened up her creative mind, created resonance within and helped her recognize her viewpoint and style. “Sometimes a wash of slip and a tiny carve or pencil mark is all I want and other times, I like to fill the vessel’s surface with markings. But I also favor the tension that asymmetry or additions to the vessel with clay or other materials can bring to the piece, which feels like my internal personality waving at you through the piece,” she says. “I live for the composition of the story on the clay and view the clay as a narrative or as the processing of a thought or mood. Later, when the piece is finished, I hope that the viewer can see things in it that they relate to as well even if it’s different than my intentions.” The markings her clay pieces exhibit are, she says, “my private and public lexicon and response to the external world.”

Winged Object. Beth Elliott, artist

Creative expression for her, Elliott says, is powerful and healing for brain and body. “The first time I had a garden was the first time I experienced peace,” she says. “I was truly in the moment and present. I had not had that ability or feeling until tending a garden. It became an obsession—if one can combine peace with obsessive tendencies. The same thing happens to me when I make art. I have peace. The stress falls away and I can only think about or see what is in front of me.” And, she adds, “My art practice is what I have that is truly mine, not client-based and not precision-based, and that way of working is healing for my mind and hands.”

Learn more or make an appointment to visit Beth Elliott’s home studio at BethElliottStudio.com, and follow her on Instagram (BethElliottStudio). Find her work in Asheville at Gallery COR, Torched AVL, the brand-new Joan Awake, and online at ArtPlay Studio, and in Greenville, SC at Art and Light Gallery.

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