Elif Soyer

Artist Statement

I have a very full life and I am fortunate to have been able to choose my careers and lifestyle. There is a certain routine that develops over time in any lifestyle. For me, routine has always created a sense of safety from which I have been able to venture out and do not so routine things like sewing pieces of textile together to create neural networks turned into stuffed toy-like sculpture, and training Olympic hopefuls and national champions in fencing. Routine is also imposed on me through the constant flow of information that comes via "snail-mail" into my home and work place. I bring the mail in, I sort through and keep what I need to live my life (bills and such) and that which gets shredded and/or goes into the recycling bin. At some point, this routine (any routine) becomes a cycle and the cycle takes hold. When I think about the cycle too much the comfort in it starts to fade away and a semi-nihilistic shadow creeps further and further in and threatens to stop me in my tracks. In this work I am happy to bring in the future recyclable info-garbage, parse it out of it's context of capitalistic routine and once again create my own context. In the end, what is created is also object, but I hope also a humorous and interesting way to view interact with the mundane.

Bio

Elif Soyer is a Turkish-American artist. She received a BA in Economics from Emory University in 1985, a studio diploma in 1995 and a MFA in 1997 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is also a fencing coach and co-owner of Moe Fencing Club in Somerville, MA where she trains Olympic hopefuls, weekend warriors and some of the top-ranked fencers in the US. Her work has oscillated between drawing on the interior landscape of the human body and the exterior landscape of her immediate environment, but has always had a very strong tie to time through layering or other seemingly obsessive processes. While she loves the process of painting and drawing, she has a very strong attraction to so-called "untraditional" mediums such as gravel, discarded textile, raw clay and scraps of day to day life.

Work available on Artsy