Eleanor Foy
Opening & Pottery Sale
Friday, May 16, 2025, 5-7 pm
Eleanor Foy is inspired by the American West and makes these fantastic shadowbox tableaus filled with her ceramic objects These illusionistic wonderlands are lit with ultraviolet lights which makes her light sensitive glazes glow and sparkle. Foy has just graduated with her MFA from the Lamar Dodd School of Art and is heading out to New Mexico. She is cleaning out her studio and Foyer will also host a pottery sale during the opening party. This is a great chance to collect some of Foy’s magnificent sculptures.
ARTIST BIO
Eleanor Foy is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Athens, Georgia. Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, the landscape and mythology of California and the American West informs her work. Foy studied painting at Pratt Institute in New York, then transferred to Kansas City Art Institute to complete her BFA in ceramics (2021). She has exhibited nationally and has received numerous awards, including the Regina Brown Undergraduate Student Fellowship through the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) and the Warren MacKenzie Advancement Award through the Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Foy holds an MFA (2025) from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I build ceramic objects that reference geologic forms and images of Americana, constructing tableaus of fictionalized landscapes. I am interested in the way space is perceived and I like to play with creating illusions. Some of my works are like miniature theaters. Other pieces are more ambiguous, reminiscent of familiar forms like swans or curtains but distant enough from these comparisons to be unsettling.
The title of this exhibition, Day for Night, comes from a technique used in a lot of old Westerns that simulates a night scene filmed in daylight. Before digital cameras, film was tinted blue or underexposed in post-processing to imitate moonlight. It’s usually an ineffective illusion – an appropriate title for this body of work.
My work, Swamp, was informed by my travels in the South, especially to the black waters of the Okefenokee. It is a 4 foot-long box lined in black velvet. It is both a window into another world and a container of specimens, like an aquarium. Inside are barbed ceramic trees, some a glossy black, but most left unglazed and totally matte. Although there is no lighting mechanism in the box, the pink trees look illuminated, because they are so bright against the void behind them. The black trees fade into the background. This illusion is hypnotic, the negative space is charged and eerie.
In my piece, Moon, the curtains are glazed with a low-temperature red glaze that glows under an ultraviolet light, which is concealed behind the walnut frame. I developed these light sensitive glazes to exploit the physical instability of perception: literally, how light waves hit the eye. To me these glazes reveal the false neutrality of context. Everything requires certain conditions to be perceived.
Desert is a square box that must be approached in order to see inside. Inside, the box is lined with black velvet and lit from within by ultraviolet light. The dust that gets stuck in the velvet is illuminated, and this feels like a real magic trick – it becomes a galaxy in the depth of the night sky. Like a view from an airplane, we see the desert floor below, dotted with plastic pegs that might be bar lights, might be neon signs.
In addition to my tableaux boxes, Swans, glossy black figures, overlook the viewers. Although they are hung on the wall like taxidermy, their gazes are pointed. It’s unclear what role they play in the story, and thus constitute an eerie presence.