Elise Whittemore is a painter and printmaker in Grand Isle, Vermont. She has a BFA from Syracuse University where she studied printmaking, photography, and design. Her studies have included woodblock printmaking and lithography at the Art Students’ League in New York (1985-1988) and a painting residency at the School of Visual Arts (1989). She’s been a member of the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists’ Coalition (1992-1993), as well as 215 College Gallery in Burlington, VT (2008-2012). She’s curated multiple shows in different venues around Vermont and taught high schoolers through the Young Curators of Vermont. In 2017, she was given the mid-career Barbara Smail award from the Burlington City Arts organization.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Printmaking forces me to look at multiples, and think about why I use the same images over and over again. Exploring the process of drawing, cutting, and printing the same shapes repeatedly changes my understanding of those shapes, and the meanings I give to them. Through repetition, muscle memory comes into play, and through difficult materials, I’m forced to think about how hand and material work together to create meaning. Looking at the history of quiltmaking, I’ve been interested in how geometric abstraction has been put to work to articulate ideas of home and environment. Simple patterns, used complexly, convey multiple meanings, illustrating the work women did in narrating their own stories. Naming the patterns was a practice of materializing thoughts of home, identity, and politics. Mapping, trail marking, and landscape configurations also influence my work. Shapes contain space and delineate boundaries—all ways of thinking about how we stand in the world; how we mark our territory; and how we think about the places we claim.