Season I Artist Highlight: Elie Porter Trubert on Decolonizing Walking + Ephemeral Sculpture

Synovium Podcast

Elie Porter Trubert is a New Jersey artist who works across a variety of media including sculpture, installation, audio, and photography. She is driven by a deep connection to nature, concern for the environment, and an interest in non-traditional art spaces. She has developed an ongoing contemplative walking practice that involves the creation of ephemeral, site specific sculptural works assembled from gathered natural materials. These pieces allude to impermanence, interconnectedness, and attunement. She creates “circle meditations” during her walks and leaves them for human and more-than-human others to find. Ultimately they will be washed or blown away, or changed by natural processes. She documents her ephemeral pieces using photography and video and has been exploring the role of those media in the work. In recognition of her positionality, Elie began a “re-gifting” practice of returning what she had previously taken in an attempt to undo the damage and potential violence of those actions. Going back in time in a sense, she creates work using materials sourced over many years. The resulting pieces are offered back in apology and in an expression of gratitude. Going forward, in terms of using materials sourced from nature in her work, Elie is developing and internalizing a process and approach for a walking-with practice with the goal of fostering a relationship with the more-than-human that is healing, consensual, and reciprocal. A long-time nonprofit arts leader, Elie led The Center for Contemporary Art in Bedminster, New Jersey until last year. Her work has been exhibited widely, most recently at Sala752 in Zaczernie, Poland and ASC Gallery in London, England. She has a BA Studio Art from Kenyon College and is an MFA candidate at the University of New Mexico.