Artist Statement

I have always been uncomfortable naming my show and my work. This show is called Native Pollinators because as I went through the process of working on these pieces, it started to remind me of my garden. I am fortunate, in an urban environment, to have enough of an outdoor space that I can get lost in the details of what grows in it without me having brought it in on purpose. In the beginning, this space was paved with 3 inch deep black top which in turn covered another 7 inches or so of concrete. With the help of time and a sledgehammer the same space is a home for a peach tree, apple trees, a cherry tree, roses, wisteria and other plants we collected and planted over time. 30 years later, what the garden has become though, above and beyond what we have planted on purpose, is a haven for all manner of plants that my dogs, birds, rats, rabbits and who know what other critters (and let’s not forget the wind) have brought in and germinated so that starting around late April, the whole space becomes a haven for our native pollinators. I get a great amount of joy spending at least a few minutes of every day snooping around and examining what’s growing, “curating” our leafy and flowery guests and bringing some order into the lovely chaos they create.

When I started imagining this body of work, none of the above was on my mind. I was just solely determined to go through and repurpose as much of the paint that has over time made my studio its resting place. I also wanted to free myself of specifically image driven work and allow myself to make decisions without labeling any of them as mistakes. A year into the work, I started seeing how the buildup started feeling more and more like my garden space as I started seeing unexpected harmonies and interactions between and among the various colors, textures, shapes, pattens, densities and negative spaces.

Artist Bio

Elif Soyer is a Turkish-American artist. She received a BA in Economics from Emory University in 1985, a studio diploma from the SMFA in 1995 and a MFA in 1997 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tuft University, Boston. Her work has been shown in the US and abroad, and 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 the passing of time through layering or other 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, concrete and scraps of day to day life. Her more recent work is a compilation of experience as journaled onto, combined with daily scraps of correspondence and out-edited art from previous trains of though and expression. Elif comes from a family background of Turkish artists and poets of some renown including Bedri Rahmi and Eren Eyüboğlu, and Sabahattin Eyüboğlu. 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. She is starting her 5th season as head coach of the Brandeis Men’s and Women’s NCAA fencing team.