Eliza Frensley

Eliza Frensley uses printmaking, photography, sound, video, and reconstructed imagery to examine how cultural narratives are formed. Her work considers documentation not as neutral evidence, but as a selective process through which memory, identity, and history become visible.

An image may appear to preserve an event, yet it always reflects a point of view. What is included, omitted, staged, or emphasized determines the story it tells. Frensley is interested in the distance between that constructed story and the reality it claims to represent.

Her attention to images began within a supportive family environment. Frensley’s parents took her to different cities specifically to visit museums and exhibitions, including the Art Institute of Chicago and institutions throughout New York City. These experiences introduced her to a wide range of artistic practices before she began considering art as a profession.

That possibility became more concrete when she attended the Tennessee Governor’s School for the Arts before her senior year of high school. The intensive three-week program placed her in visual arts courses taught by professional artists and gave her an early experience of college-level study. It was the first time she seriously imagined building a career in the arts.

Frensley later earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Temple University with a focus on Entrepreneurial Studies. She continued her education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, earning a master’s degree in Studio Arts with a minor in Art History.

Her formal education reinforced a view of artistic ability grounded in labor rather than innate talent. Frensley resists descriptions of artists as simply “talented” because the term can obscure the sustained practice behind strong work.

“Most strong artists develop through sustained effort and discipline,” she says.

Mentorship was particularly important to that development. Professors and professional artists taught Frensley to evaluate her work critically and to separate analysis from personal attachment. Questions about why she was making something became as important as questions about how it was made.

This process expanded both her technical skill and the research behind her practice. Frensley recognizes emotion as a legitimate source for art, but her education encouraged her to move beyond expression alone. Observation, context, and conceptual clarity became necessary parts of the work.

Printmaking remains her primary medium. She works with copper plates, lithography stones, and processes that require repeated preparation, revision, and printing. The medium is labor-intensive and precise, but its structure also allows for experimentation.

When printmaking cannot fully carry an idea, Frensley turns to sound, video, or sculpture. These shifts are not attempts to establish a completely different practice. They provide additional ways of examining the same concerns through time, space, movement, and physical form.

Her work repeatedly returns to cultural narrative and storytelling. Photography, film, and print serve as both materials and subjects because each can document experience while simultaneously shaping how that experience is understood.

Family archives and historical photographs have provided important source material. Through reconstruction, Frensley examines how images preserve familial and cultural narratives while also reorganizing them. A photograph can retain evidence of a person or place, yet its apparent truth may conceal socioeconomic inequality, spiritual practices, private conflict, or the deliberate production of a favorable public identity.

Architectural and animal motifs often reinforce these questions. Their meanings shift according to location and context, demonstrating that symbols do not carry universal interpretations.

The writings of Susan Sontag have influenced how Frensley considers the viewpoint embedded within every photograph. Richard Avedon’s Borrowed Dogs and Carrie Mae Weems’s The Kitchen Table Series further demonstrated how images construct narratives and direct perception.

“What we accept as truth in an image may not hold the same validity in reality,” Frensley observes.

She is also inspired by Carrie Lingscheit, Emma Nishimura, and Ragnar Kjartansson. Rather than borrowing a consistent style from these artists, she looks to the conceptual and technical possibilities their work makes visible. Their practices motivate her to continue experimenting with how an idea can be represented.

Frensley begins a project by writing down ideas and assembling references. She photographs her surroundings extensively, creating an archive that later informs observational drawings and print compositions. Conversation is another part of the process. Explaining an idea to peers helps clarify its structure and increases her commitment to pursuing it.

This movement between observation, discussion, and material production became especially significant during two artist residencies in South Korea with Naughty Muse Studios and the Print Art Research Center. Both residencies were organized around production, with participants expected to complete enough work for an exhibition by the program’s conclusion.

While there, Frensley noticed the prevalence of magpies. A guided tour introduced her to their association with good fortune in Korean culture, an interpretation that contrasted with Western narratives connecting the birds to superstition and bad luck.

The contradiction became the foundation of her residency work.

Frensley photographed the birds and engaged with members of the local community before translating those observations into prints. The resulting body of work did not attempt to decide which interpretation was correct. Instead, it examined how the same animal could carry opposing meanings across different cultural settings.

The magpie became evidence that symbolism is produced collectively. Its physical form remains recognizable, but the narrative surrounding it changes according to history, belief, and location. By moving between those interpretations, Frensley made cultural context itself part of the image.

The project also offered a new direction within her existing concerns. Before the residencies, she had focused heavily on family archives and old photographs. Shifting toward the magpies changed her subject without abandoning her interest in documentation and storytelling.

This is one way Frensley responds to creative fatigue. When a familiar framework begins to feel repetitive, she changes the subject while retaining the conceptual questions beneath it. A new image can restore attention because it requires a different process of observation and research.

Learning a new technique provides another route forward. Workshops and conferences allow her to occupy the position of a student again, reducing the pressure to produce a resolved outcome. Experimentation becomes possible because uncertainty is expected.

Frensley also acknowledges burnout as a practical condition of creative work. Repetition can produce technical fluency, but remaining within one structure for too long may diminish curiosity. Her practice therefore depends upon alternating between sustained concentration and deliberate change.

A typical working day includes administrative responsibilities such as email, applications, and open-call submissions. Studio time operates differently. Once engaged with a copper plate or lithography stone, Frensley becomes absorbed in the repeated stages required to develop, process, and print an image.

This labor is only one part of what draws her to printmaking. The medium is also deeply communal. Equipment, technical knowledge, workshops, and studio spaces often require cooperation, creating opportunities for exchange among artists.

Frensley considers these relationships one of the most fulfilling aspects of her career. “Printmaking, in particular, is a deeply communal and collaborative practice,” she explains. The community surrounding the medium has provided technical support, conversation, and sustained encouragement.

That emphasis on exchange shapes the advice she gives emerging artists. She encourages them to travel, learn from others, and enter unfamiliar communities. Exposure to different working methods and cultural narratives can transform how an artist understands both subject and process.

She is equally direct about rejection. Applications and professional opportunities frequently end without acceptance, and that experience remains difficult even when it becomes familiar. Still, repeated rejection has made individual successes more meaningful and has not displaced her willingness to continue applying.

Frensley’s practice is grounded in this persistence. A print develops through pressure, transfer, reversal, and repetition. The process mirrors her larger investigation of visual culture, where an image is never merely received. It is produced through particular decisions, circulated through specific systems, and interpreted within changing contexts.