Sculpture Space

Elissa Cox

Work created during residency.


Work created prior to residency.


(Click on image to enlarge.)

Athens, OH
July-August 2008

About the Artist

Elissa Cox is an installation artist whose work derives from synthesizing figurative imagery and that of landscape whether imagined or taken from reality. She intends to personify forms that exude a sense of energy, a sense of vitality a sense of rawness, of beauty or sublime decadence – namely, and one that examines the gap between the ordinary and extraordinary.

Elissa received her undergraduate degrees in art history and studio arts from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN; she received her MFA from Ohio University in Athens, OH. One person shows in 2007 and 2008 include Rupture at Slocomb Galleries in Johnson City TN, From Hither to Thither at the Lexington Art League in Lexington KY, and Seep at the New Harmony Contemporary Art Gallery in New Harmony, IN. Post graduate school Elissa taught for one year as a visiting lecturer at the University of Kentucky in Lexington and this upcoming year she will be an Assistant Professor of Art at Upper Iowa University in Fayette, IA.

Project Description

At Sculpture Space I created several works that will come together to form future installations in 2009 at Penn State University, PA and Sculpture Center in Cleveland OH.

Visually representing pain, beauty and the rawness found within our physical bodies, I used a wide variety of different materials to create works that evoke a close relationship to beauty and pain. In the works, with a twitch and a grimace, I was strongly influenced from many forms that I find in nature and that of the mysterious landscape of interiors of our bodies. I find similarities and paradox’s in the way in which nature and the body distorts / controls itself to conquer / submit to a disease or a parasite. Our sixth sense of proprioception, which provides our bodies feedback solely on the status of the ourselves internally; demonstrates that the body has sensation within, and of itself with minimal input from the outside world. Far more can be said of internal turmoil with just a twitch and a grimace to denote conflict that occurs within us.