ELSPETH SLAYTER

I am a painter and printmaker working in Provincetown, MA, US. My work focuses on one’s ongoing familiarity with internal and external consciousness in different environments. I aim to create a dialogue with how memory is managed using place-specific motifs in my work. Embracing process-based abstraction in the creation of my monotype-paintings, I use layers of pigment and form to evoke how we experience the weathered memories of place, most recently, the Provincelands of the Outer Cape. I focus on rural places that may at times feel forgotten given the crushing drive towards global urbanization. My printmaking is a process of excavation—where emotion, experience, and time meet in layered form. My dune grass works chart overlapping layers of consciousness: what we remember, what fades, and what returns altered. The works are made in such a way that they gradually build into textured, emotionally resonant fields. Each monotype-painting offers a tactile intimacy, reflecting on how specific landscapes - such as Cape Cod’s dunescapes - hold layers of memory and change. The gestures that surface, recede, and blur into one another hold space for the ambiguous and unseen aspects of places in transition, insisting that even as the world urbanizes, the stories held in these landscapes endure.

Artist’s Biography: I have practiced painting, drawing and printmaking since high school. My undergraduate studies at Macalester College focused on history and anthropology. I studied for a master’s degree social work at New York University, and obtained a master’s and doctoral degree in public policy at Brandeis University. Alongside the arts, I have been a forensic social worker and most recently a research professor at Salem State University. A deep interest in life cycles and systems animates my work, from my research to my multi-layered monotype-paintings.