STATEMENT
I have been creating artist’s books since 1982. Experimenting with the book format was a natural outcome of my work in paper collage. I work on books and collages simultaneously. In my books I use traditional structures as well as sculptural and innovative forms. Handmade, oriental and painted papers, book cloth, string, boards and glue are my materials. These materials are fragile yet durable.
I work with images that incorporate the use of language, maps, my drawings of people of different ethnicities, as well as other forms of communication, such as music, sign, mathematics, hieroglyphics and Braille. I utilize fragments of script, from many languages, in order to show the interrelatedness of different cultures and their commonality. In some of the pieces I use the circle as a compositional element, which is both structural and symbolic. In many of my books I manipulate the text in a purely visual form as pattern, without regard to its meaning, in these books I see the words as visual abstractions. In other works the content of the language is important to me. The maps, people and text depicted in my art, represent my hope that we can live together in peace and harmony.
BIOGRAPHY
Evelyn Eller was born in New York City and has lived there most of her life. She attended an arts oriented high school in NY and subsequently went to the Art Students League, NY for three years on a scholarship. She later studied in Rome, Italy on a Fulbright Fellowship. She also took classes at the Pratt Graphic Center and the School of Visual Arts in NY, and was awarded a residency at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY.
She has worked in various mediums, oil and acrylic paintings, and printmaking, but her primary medium now is paper collage and artists books. She has traveled extensively. Her interest in travel and other cultures is reflected in the use of different languages in her artists’ books and language fragment collages as well as her landscape images.
She has exhibited widely, nationally and internationally, at the Whitney, Queens and Brooklyn Museums in New York City, The Smithsonian, National Jewish Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and in Mexico, Hungary, Switzerland, Italy, India and Germany, and other exhibition spaces. She is represented in numerous public and corporate collections in the United States and abroad, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY- Museum of the City of New York- Indianapolis Museum of Fine Art, Ind.- Museum of Modern Art, NY- Brooklyn Museum, NY – Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY- National Museum of Women in the Arts, Wash. D.C.- Tyler Museum of Art, Texas – King Stephens Museum, Hungary- El Archivero, Mexico- Yale University, Conn,- , New York Historical Society – University of California, LA- University of Alberta, Canada- University of Western Michigan, MI- University of Vermont -Florida Atlantic University- Rutgers University, NJ- Yeshiva University Museum, NY and George Mason University in Virginia.
Evelyn Eller’s Website
