RSVP for Elly Dec's performance "The Fold" on Wednesday, February 26 at 6:30 pm
RSVP for Elly's bead-weaving workshop happening on February: Friday 14, Saturday 15, Sunday 16, Friday 21, and Sunday 23
"Hands were our first calculators, marking days and nights, tracking cycles and prayers, palpitating anomalies, and bearing witness to the rhythms and ruptures of life, the earth, and the skies. Rooted in this primal arithmetic, my work explores computation as both a human act and a force of natural origin—a fundamental engine of growth that leverages material and difference to determine form and pattern.
Weaving with glass beads—a material historically tied to tallying, recording, and adornment—I create paintings and wall and table sculptures that emerge from the inside out. Each bead is placed by hand, guided by pre-verbal rule systems. Some rules mimic basic cellular growth. Other rules are inspired by cellular automata like the Game of Life, where local interactions generate intricate global patterns. These elemental yet universal rules, foundational to computer science, are inherent in natural processes—they are the engines of propagation: growth and decay, symmetry and disruption. My work reveals how complexity emerges from fundamental interactions. Each piece is a rigorous, self-contained, internally consistent system, where patterns emerge through the dynamic interplay of rule and chance, conformity and deviation. Ink may flow through and paint may obscure beads, subverting the relentless order of algorithmic systems. I seek to hold the tension between order and disruption, symmetry and imperfection, growth and entropy, offering a tactile immediacy that anchors my work in the handmade."
Elly is a lifelong, n-th generation textile maker, having learned to knit, crochet and sew from her mother and her Babci. As a child, she was steeped in math studies, puzzles, and pattern-making, and pursued a technical career across several industries and countries. Her art practice has developed in recent years to include study of classical drawing, painting, and art theory at the Art Students League and at the Goshen Art Academy in NYC, and she brings this art historical sensibility to bear in her bead weaving practice. She resides in Brooklyn, and her studio is in Long Island City.
We welcome Elly to the studio as our February WIP resident!
You can visit her studio Sundays from 2pm to 5pm.
Textile Arts Center’s Work in Progress (TAC WIP) is a window into the studio practice of contemporary artists and designers that engages the public in a dialogue with the field of textiles.
