about the artist
Eliza Frensley was born and raised in Middle Tennessee. She received her BFA in Printmaking with Entrepreneurial Studies from Tyler School of Art & Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. A main priority of Frensley’s practice is connection with her community. Post graduation, she became a member of Philadelphia's Second State Press, a community print studio, and worked with Temple University's Disability Resources and Services Department as a studio helper. After returning to Tennessee, she continued her community outreach. She volunteered to bring printmaking to the Nashville School of the Arts, worked as a substitute teacher for Metro Nashville Public Schools, and co-organized a juried printmaking exhibition in the Nashville Arcade Studio Gallery 58. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK).
Frensley has exhibited work throughout Tennessee and has shown in juried exhibitions, including the Full Court Press Juried Print Exhibition of the Americas at the Art Center of Corpus Christi, TX; the Delta National Small Prints Exhibition at the Bradbury Art Museum, AR; the 2024 Printmaking Juried Exhibition at Five Points Arts Center in Torrington, CT; imPressed: Don’t Look Up at the Art Gym Gallery in Denver, CO; and in the 11th Annual International Juried Print Exhibition: With precision at the Remarque Print Workshop and Gallery in Albuquerque, NM.
artist statement
My practice explores the significance of my nuclear family’s origin and future, examining how perceptions and expectations are passed down through creative narratives. As a printmaker and storyteller, I use print and time-based art processes to address the historical and contemporary roles of these narratives documented and archived over generations—both as repositories of inherited truth and facilitators of fabrication and misinterpretation.
The multiple, a defining characteristic of printmaking and time-based art, allows me to layer and juxtapose fragments of overlapping information. These processes support my ideas by re-interpreting historical documents in a way that both references familiar forms of communication and serves as a metaphor for the complexities of memory and storytelling.
Inspired by the tension between my family’s idealized history and the uncertain truth of its heritage, I construct alternative compositions using family archives. By scrutinizing photographs, newspaper clippings, film, and storytelling, I animate and exploit the abstracted and romanticized narratives I have inherited. My work goes beyond questions of truth, reframing perceived realities by combining elements of the original with disruptive textures and visual metaphors. In this way, I compose family secrets and unspoken histories alongside outwardly polished representations of domestic and socially performative life. By intertwining imagery and stories across different timelines, my work challenges the concept of linear time, navigating the space between real and imagined histories.