Elsha Yeyesuswork

November 10 – December 22

Friction is an attempt to recon with time. This project was first conceptualized in the summer of 2022 as a means of disrupting the pace of my usual ceramic production. Pace, production, and time have become the grounding forces of my studio practice. With the price of every minute calculated carefully (output-input), time has become just as much a commodity as the work I make and sell. Labour, need, and rest the necessary costs of this living.

Stuck in the relentless march forward, I find defiance in moving slowly.

The physicality of the medium grounds this work and its maker. In building slowly, I’ve tried to stall momentum, delay whatever is coming next. The discomfort of stillness keeps challenging me but beyond the strain is, hopefully, peace.

Friction is a meditation on patience. Under the crushing weight of time, left behind in the wake of things I can’t control, I’ve lost fragments of self that have chipped off bit by bit. But I’m still here, harnessed to this place through this moment and each one before it.

Elsha Yeyesuswork is an artist and arts administrator based in Moh’kins’tsis, Treaty 7 Territory. Her practice is rooted in themes of identity, displacement, and diaspora. Originally from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Elsha’s ceramic practice is rooted in the lineage of makers who have produced wares for generations on her ancestral land. She holds a BA in International Relations from the University of Calgary and works to bring her understanding of the social sciences into her artistic practice.