Elsa Mora (b. 1971)
Artist Statement
Coping Tools and Other Artifacts is a series of ceramics about crisis and recovery. Mental and emotional health have played an important role in my creative practice, especially in the last few years. Observing and participating in my son’s journey through autism has brought invaluable lessons, unexpected difficulties, celebration, sadness, and ultimately; discovery. Working with clay is a metaphor for the malleability of the brain and its great capacity for transformation.
These ceramics start with a general idea of what I want. Some of them represent identifiable objects, while others are abstract and suggestive of organic shapes found in nature, but all of them are somehow connected to the subject of coping. It is mostly through the titles what I reveal some aspects of the specific idea that I’m exploring. In terms of fabrication, I use slabs that I create by pressing pieces of clay on a table surface with a wooden rolling pin. I then cut out different shapes with a potter’s knife to combine and create these objects. What follows is the application of colored underglaze with a brush, followed by a period where I let the pieces dry until they’re ready for bisque firing. Once the piece is in the bisque state, I sometimes draw on the surface with underglaze pencils. The last step consists
Elsa Mora is an artist and curator. A recipient of the UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for Artists, she was born and raised in Cuba and moved to Los Angeles in 2001, where she lived until 2014. Mora currently resides between upstate New York and New Jersey.
Elsa’s art has been exhibited worldwide in art galleries and museums. She taught at the Vocational School of Arts in Camagüey, Cuba, and has been a visiting artist at the Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco State University, the Art Institute of Boston, the MoMA Design Store, and the National Gallery of Art, among others.
Her work is in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; the Long Beach Museum of Art, California; and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon. Mora has collaborated as an illustrator with such organizations as the Museum of Modern Art, Chronicle Books, The New York Review of Books, Penguin Random House, The Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan, and teNeues, among others.
Mora is one of the founding members of ArtYard, a contemporary art center based in Frenchtown, New Jersey, where she is artistic director and curator