Link Pin Art
Presents
Ellen Crofts
Let Her Rip
October 3 – October 27
Opening reception: October 3, 6-8pm
Artist talk: October 17, 6-8pm
May Explain, photo by Ellen Crofts
Link & Pin presents Let Her Rip, a solo exhibition Ellen Crofts. Austin-based artist Crofts creates constructions out of paper and other materials that reflect on the joy of creation and destruction.
In children's play, destruction is often as integral as creation—towers are knocked down, objects dumped, torn, or ripped apart. Through intuitive and joyful exploration, children learn about the world: they discover what their hands can do, the effects of the laws of nature, and the power they themselves can wield over the materials around them.
Crofts approaches her materials with the same spirit of playful experimentation, offering an alternative to the passive, screen-based experience of the digital world. By puncturing, tearing, cutting, painting, and gluing—mostly using paper—she aggressively engages with the physical world of her materials, discovering the effects she can impose. The resulting artwork proposes an unmediated, interactive approach to the physical world, as a source of pleasure as well as power.
For Crofts, the use of paper as a primary material allows the viewer to have a personal connection with her artwork. Most people are intimately familiar with paper in their everyday lives because up until our current digital age it has been ubiquitous and usually easily accessible– in schools, offices, on products and advertising. We understand its physical qualities. Her organic constructions invite the viewer to re-engage with and imagine the feeling of the paper in her artwork and what it would be like to handle and work with the materials.
The works in Let Her Rip demonstrate an unaffected approach to creating objects, in which experimentation, play, and destruction serve as powerful tools for engaging with the world around us.
Ellen Crofts is a visual artist based in Austin, Texas. She studied studio art at Portland State University and the Art Students League of New York and is currently an MFA candidate at the Maryland Institute College of Art.