Elyse Eliot-Los
A mixed-media artist who creates mandalas and labyrinthine installations of quilted fibre, Elyse Eliot-Los was born in Holland and studied art in her childhood under the mentorship of a prominent Dutch artist who lived near her. After moving to Alberta in 1957, she enrolled almost immediately in the Red Deer Art Club, and later pursued her B.F.A. in Sculpture and B.A. in Art History at the University of Calgary (1971 – 1976). She undertook post-graduate studies in Fibre Arts at the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts (1981 – 1982), and deployed the skills she’d gained to make handmade paper and fabric wall hangings for the studio she had built in Benalto, Alberta, west of Sylvan Lake.
With her artistic collaborator Janice Johnson, Eliot-Los took fifteen years to create one of her best known works, Labyrinth (2003). Consisting of fibre-quilted, dyed, silk-screened, embroidered, beaded three meter by one and a half meter fabric panels, the installation is held aloft by papiér mâche statues and metal poles. Audiences wind their way into the maze’s inner sanctum to experience its gestalt. The work arose from the partners’ fascination with fractals. Eliot-Los’s mother, an electronics-enthusiast, had introduced the partners to the concept after connecting a sewing machine to a computer to try to replicate a screen-saver’s fractals; Eliot-Los says the patterns represent a mystical window to the universe. Her other installations include the cathedral ceiling-like Sacred Illumination complete with gold leaf, and the work called Two-Fold Iterations No. 1 which resembles the patterns of peacock feathers.
Eliot-Los taught art for decades and has been the curator of Calgary’s Muttart Gallery (1982 – 1984) and Red Deer’s Old Courthouse Art Gallery (1995 – 1996). She has sat on the board of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and chaired its Art Collection Committee. Her work has been widely collected and exhibited throughout Canada, the U.S., and the Netherlands.
With her artistic collaborator Janice Johnson, Eliot-Los took fifteen years to create one of her best known works, Labyrinth (2003). Consisting of fibre-quilted, dyed, silk-screened, embroidered, beaded three meter by one and a half meter fabric panels, the installation is held aloft by papiér mâche statues and metal poles. Audiences wind their way into the maze’s inner sanctum to experience its gestalt. The work arose from the partners’ fascination with fractals. Eliot-Los’s mother, an electronics-enthusiast, had introduced the partners to the concept after connecting a sewing machine to a computer to try to replicate a screen-saver’s fractals; Eliot-Los says the patterns represent a mystical window to the universe. Her other installations include the cathedral ceiling-like Sacred Illumination complete with gold leaf, and the work called Two-Fold Iterations No. 1 which resembles the patterns of peacock feathers.
Eliot-Los taught art for decades and has been the curator of Calgary’s Muttart Gallery (1982 – 1984) and Red Deer’s Old Courthouse Art Gallery (1995 – 1996). She has sat on the board of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and chaired its Art Collection Committee. Her work has been widely collected and exhibited throughout Canada, the U.S., and the Netherlands.