Elisa Dore is an artist of Puerto Rican descent born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. Primarily working in printmaking, she uses her practice as a way of carving out identity, exploring personal and ancestral histories, and communing with subconscious ways of knowing. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, and The Hall of Awa Japanese Handmade Paper. She is a recipient of the Ernest G. Welch Fellowship and finalist for the 2024 AXA Art Prize, and currently is an MFA candidate in printmaking at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
Statement:
My work exists as a record of personal and ancestral histories, my bicultural lived experience, and how place can inform constructions of identity.
Printmaking functions as a vehicle for recording in my practice—the Spanish word for printmaking, grabado, also means recorded. In an attempt to physically manifest amorphous concepts of identity, duality, culture, or memories, an image carved into wood or etched into stone offers a tangible answer—the extraneous is physically removed, leaving behind the intrinsic and the necessary. Rooted in my lived experience as a mixed Puerto Rican and white woman, my work addresses interstitial ways of being that are often untranslatable to words.