Philadelphia artist Elissa DeFranceschi creates sculptures inspired by what she describes as ‘personal fables’. She expresses her life experiences in the form of animals, anthropomorphized domestic objects, and elements of folklore. As a mixed media artist, she is constantly browsing her surroundings for discarded objects, trinkets in antique stores, or items within her intimate belongings to combine with basic materials like plaster, clay, wood, and paint. Emerging from this process is a series of characters that represent specific parts of herself, navigating the qualms and questions of their universe. 

Elissa’s sculptures are varied in scale and materials to explore the relationship between real and imagined. Working intuitively, she is able to unearth repressed emotions or memories and create vessels for these objects to tell their stories. Her artwork meditates on symbols, metaphors and analogies related to her spirituality, animism, the occult, feminism, and domesticity. At the core of her practice is a desire to connect deeply with herself and others through a universal visual language.

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