“Birds on a Wire”

In the fantastical worlds of artist Leslie Elliottsmith’s digital collages, women kick the moon into the night sky. They worry over nests, encircling their feet and weighing down their hands. They carry a clock—the same one, always, square and stuck at 12:50. The birds are drawn to them, the egrets and the songbirds and the spoonbills alike. Occasionally, wings sprout forth straight from these women’s backs, confusing the otherwise-all-too-clear lines between the human world and the natural one.

The compositions come to Elliottsmith from the depths of her innermost frustrations, which compel her to scribble down fragments of words and ideas onto scraps of paper, preserved in piles. “You should see my desk,” she tells me. “But that’s how I’ve always worked.”

[Read James Fox-Smith's "Perspectives" profile on Leslie Elliottsmith from 2017, here.]

The sixty-eight-year-old multi-media artist has been cutting and pasting and telling stories through visuals since she was a child, stealing her mother’s kitchen scissors. “I swear, even as an old woman, she would tell me, ‘You always stole my scissors,’” laughs Elliottsmith.  From that early age, “it was one thing I just knew. I had no doubt that I wanted to be an artist.”

Across her vast body of work—which includes sculpture, pottery, weaving, furniture-making, painting, and photography—Elliottsmith’s tendency toward the hallucinatory, the whimsical, the ominous carries through, as do the trappings of allegory. “I’ve always done narrative work,” she says. “I just feel like I have to say something.”

Elliottsmith says that she tries to keep the political concerns that motivate much of her work relatively subtle, but themes of environmental collapse and women’s rights especially color her collections over the past decade, with increasing urgency. A vocabulary of symbols threads through her entire body of work, whispering these underlying messages. Water is everywhere—as easily a force of renewal and change as of destruction, much like fire. The waters and the fires occasionally cradle a boat, a totem of the journey. Birds act as messengers, ever-tied to their nests—which stand in for home and domesticity.

“The nest, the idea that a woman is dictated to by being the vessel—she’s the homemaker, the one that produces the child, and often according to society, that’s it,” explains Elliottsmith.

And as for the women themselves—“The women? Well, yeah. I’m a feminist,” she answers with a chuckle. Usually young women, the figures appearing in Elliottsmith’s works are friends, neighbors, and her own daughter—captured during photo sessions conducted by the artist, in which she asks them to pose in one of the various tableaux derived from her scraps of notes.

“The nest, the idea that a woman is dictated to by being the vessel—she’s the homemaker, the one that produces the child, and often according to society, that’s it," —Leslie Elliottsmith

[Read another "Perspectives" profile on Louisiana artist Megan Buccere, here.]

In her 2023 collection, The Year of the Woman, the collage “Birds on a Wire” presents two of these women—mirror images of each other—facing the center, each holding in her hands a nest—one with eggs, and one with a bird. “We have one pointing to the nest, and the other holding her hand up,” describes Elliottsmith. “This is the one with the bird in it, sort of the child already born. But it’s like, wait a minute, am I now defined by this?”

A dotted line extends from the nests, wrapping around the two women—“the idea that your path is not your own,” Elliottsmith explains. Both women are enclosed in shapes resembling those of traditional houses, the outlines filled in with rippling, sun-dappled water above and wild grasses below. “They are inside nature, because we are natural beings, and will eventually go back to the earth.”

Above the women, emerging from the darkness of a night signaled by a full moon at the center, a line stretches across the scene—five birds perched upon it. “They represent the balancing act”—women’s daily work of managing society’s expectations against their own understandings of themselves; the virtues of womanhood against the virtues of self.

See more of Elliottsmith’s work in person at LeMieux Galleries and online at artelliottsmith.com.