My practice generates sensory experiences that forge deep connections with the natural world. The work responds to specific places, informing durational relationships to land. Through fieldwork and experimental research, I look at the stories embedded in soil, shifting ecologies, human impacts, and how communities inhabit specific places through their traditional knowledge. This process-driven practice manifests as an expansive body of sculptures, scents, collections, crops, dinners, performances, and even food systems that range from solitary daily tasks to large civic engagements.
Alexis Elton is an artist working with site-as-material to form connections with plants, soil, and other living beings. Her work is situated where art and agrarian systems meet with aims to create ephemeral sensory encounters. As a farmer and adobe builder, her artwork is informed by the field; likewise, fieldwork is Alexis’ creative practice.
From 2008-2015, Alexis co-operated Jubilee Farm in Chimayo, a rural village in Northern New Mexico. There she maintained a studio in the oldest plaza in the U.S., a historic building made from adobe bricks. Committed to exploring place, her work continues to take form through land reclamation, as native seed saving initiatives, farm and art education programs, and food production. Merging the everyday tasks of land-base living with a studio art sensibility, she creates opportunities to experience the natural world through physical labor, through slowness, and through the senses.
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Alexis earned a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has shown her work internationally and nationally including Kochi Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India; 5 x 5, Washington, DC; and Kingston Sculpture Biennale, Kingston, NY. She has received awards from Joan Mitchell Foundation, Santa Fe Art Institute, and NYFA, among others. Alexis grew up in New York's Hudson Valley, NY where she now lives.
