by Lee Arneson
Hello! My name’s Elayna (she/her), I’ll be newly twenty-two by the time this is printed (yes, I’m a Sagittarius) and I’m always changing my favorite color but currently it’s cedar-branch-green. I grew up in Massachusetts and moved to Olympia to attend Evergreen, where I will be graduating from this quarter after a few sweet years! I am a multimedia artist and maker, primarily focusing on 2-D works and lots of dreaming. My creations tend to focus on finding magic and beauty in the mundane everyday, forests, processing my life experiences, and bridging realms.
CPJ: What first drew you to art? Was there a specific medium that you started with, or was it mostly experimenting until you found your niche?
Elayna: This is cliche, but I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t creating. I carried some kind of paper and writing/drawing utensil around just about everywhere I went as a kid, and I still do. Painting and stories were my first mediums— though my interests in photography, sewing, and knitting began when I was around nine years old, and I started embroidering and writing poetry when I was thirteen-ish. My mom tells a story about how sometime between the ages of three and five years old, hours would pass as I painted, holding my small hand out for another sheet of paper when I felt what was before me had reached its peak.
That being said, what draws me to art is the ability to take what is in front of me and create a dream. Or take a dream and make something a bit more tangible from it. I consider painting (water-mixable oil and acrylic), photography, and embroidery my main mediums, but I still experiment whenever I can.
CPJ: Could you expand upon the style of art you create nowadays?
Elayna: Within photography I have been having a lot of fun working with 35mm film photography, mostly color. I have been challenging myself to find new-to-me ways of framing things— to see something new in the places and people whose company I frequent. My interest in stars has increased this past year, which is saying something because I’ve always loved them, and I have been drawing lots of star people. My style generally has become looser. I more often stray further away from the realistic style I was taught in order to explore what imagery stands out to represent themes and research that pique my curiosity. There have been a lot more abstracted forms in my art as I imagine ways to represent spirit and connection.”
CPJ: Would you say your art is inspired by a sense of place? Or the people you find yourself surrounded by?
Elayna: Yes! Absolutely. It is a rare occasion when my art is not based on or depicting people I know, places I have been, and things that are dear to me. I would say that my art is not just inspired by senses of place and the people I find myself surrounded by, but driven by them.
CPJ: Is there something that, in general, inspires your art–or does inspiration come more on a piece by piece basis?
Elayna: Life! Also cliche, but I really am glad to be alive as a human being capable of inspiration and creation. Some art is a long collection of thinking, researching, problem-solving, and experience. Other art is random, a surprise, jumping out from shapes the rain has made by dripping down the side of a cement building. I find myself making art within themes or trends nowadays, because while there is plenty of inspiration, not every idea is conducive to the process of translation that happens in art-making. How urgent inspiration or an idea feels also has to do with whether it makes it past the conceptual stage. No matter what journey results in an idea, there is a particular point where the application of tangible skills is necessary to bring inspiration into being.
CPJ: I know that recently you painted a mural–titled “Rekindling Relationship”–in the Lab 2 second floor lounge here on campus over the summer. While I have yet to see it in person, the photos are absolutely breathtaking & I was hoping you’d like to share with us your thought process behind creating this mural & what this mural means to you.
Elayna: Please do go see it! I’m so glad word of “Rekindling Relationship” is getting around. It is meant to be interacted with. “Rekindling Relationship” depicts a selection of plants that are native to the Salish Sea region, and a few plants that have been introduced to the area in a way that connects science with relationships and asks the viewer to make their own meaning. My intentions behind “Rekindling Relationship” was to provide people with a question of how they interact with and perceive their environments.
The process for “Rekindling Relationship” was the secondest longest I have ever worked on a project; I think of the mural beginning in summer of 2020 when I first reached out to someone at Evergreen about making it. From that point on, there were a lot of meetings, research, and negotiations. I worked with numerous faculty and staff members, including all of those who make up the Space and Land Use Group (SLUG) here on campus. Evergreen did not really have any perimeters set up for public art installations or murals such as mine, and I am not sure if they do now. Maybe it was because I was an active student, because I wanted the mural to also be an Independent Learning Contract (ILC), because the mural was to be a permanent installation (versus temporary), or because of the location— but there were a lot of questions from everyone involved on how to best handle the proposal. All of this work even before I started making the mural was difficult and often nerve wracking. I have cared intensely about this project and was stubborn in seeing it become real.
In tandem with all of that, everyone I worked with was quite supportive in making the mural happen, and I received so much help in navigating the proposal process and bringing the mural to life. There have been many people who believed in this project, and believed in me, and I can not give enough thanks for that. I took the visual arts capstone program in spring 2021. The quarter before I painted the mural, where I learned how to better conduct artistic research and sift through a project that was vital to “Rekindling Relationship” and my growth as an artist.
The time I spent actually painting the mural was a matter of weeks, with days spanning anywhere from 4-13 hours in the space. It was difficult to savor my time painting because of the time crunch, but going in and painting multiple days in a row was a method of working I had not been able to set the time aside for in a long while, if ever, and I cherish that experience a lot. There is something about painting that feels right to me, like something fits. I usually phrase it as “going into my painting world”, but I think common phrasing refers to it as “the zone”.
I had a lot of doubts through that year-long journey of whether I was capable of carrying through with my plan of the mural, up until I finished it in early September 2021. Like, every other hour kind of doubts. I came up against a lot of barriers, mostly pertaining to how I perceived my self-worth and my credibility as an artist. I don’t believe there was any part of the process that was not difficult in some way. Once I had finished, of course the entire thing seemed surreal, and now I can hardly believe it exists. The idea for the mural lived within me as so many variations for months, or more accurately for around three years because I had been wanting to do a mural on campus since winter of my freshman year. So to see this idea outside of me, having become art that now stands on its own, is incredible. All of it was worth it to see “Rekindling Relationship” in person.
CPJ: Is there anything you’ve been working on in the past couple of months? Either as an assignment, work, or just something for yourself?
Elayna: While I have numerous in-progress paintings that have received little attention recently, I have been making lots of “babies” (what I call my hand-sewn and pine-needle-filled stuffies) and embroidering holiday presents. I try to keep up a practice of carrying my film camera with me most places. Besides that, sketching and journaling for my upkeep, mending clothing, and planning future projects.
CPJ: What does your art mean to you?
Elayna: My art is my perception, my doorway, my archive, my research, my branches, my questions, my exploration. In more ways than one my art is my lifeline. I just really frickin love art, I’m not sure what else to say here. Art fills me up and simultaneously shows me where I need to/can grow.
CPJ: Are there any last words or final thoughts you’d like to share as we wrap up this interview?
Elayna: I hope you, dear reader, make something! Create something beautifully horrible and useless and magical and wonderful. Do something on purpose and make a mistake. Take a risk, whatever you want to call it. I hope you find something to love today.
Follow Elayna on Instagram & check out more of her amazing art @thefantasiesofyouth
