Electra Pelias
Art has always been omnipresent in Electra’s life, often arriving in bursts of chaotic inspiration that occasionally pushed the bounds of acceptable childhood behavior. At age seven, she was famously caught by her mother, an avid antique collector, attempting to “repair” the inlay of an 18th-century Boulle table using a mallet and craft glue. (Spoiler: Elmer’s is not a recommended restoration material.) Though the technique was questionable, the gesture was, in its own way, heartfelt (and maybe even a little brilliant).
Today, Electra channels that same scrappy, heartfelt energy into a multidisciplinary practice that spans sculpture, painting, fiber, printmaking, and digital manipulation. She gravitates toward secondhand and “once-loved” materials, often sewing, mending, or reimagining objects that carry their own histories. Her work frequently combines tactile softness with structural rigidity, creating a physical and emotional tension that mirrors the messy process of feeling deeply.
Her studio is a patchwork of the sentimental and the strange: stuffed animals awaiting surgery, scraps of fabric with ambiguous past lives, ceramic fragments that didn’t survive the kiln but insist on being included anyway. There’s often a sense of play, but it’s underpinned by something stickier: grief, memory, the need to make sense of complicated feelings. Whether she’s screenprinting a series of tender oddities or building a soft sculpture with hidden weights inside, Electra’s work invites viewers to look closer, laugh a little, and maybe wince with recognition.
Electra is currently an MFA candidate in Fine Arts at George Washington University, where she continues to explore the sweet spot between cuteness and chaos, one patch, stitch, and hand-built piece at a time. She additionally owns and operates Electra Makes, an art and accessories brand with a comprehensive online presence and steady growth in both engagement and sales. Her products are sold on her website, in over 20 retail locations nationally and internationally, and through wholesale platforms.
Website/Portfolio: Electra Makes
Instagram: @electramakes
About the Artwork
The spaces we inhabit between love and resentment, closeness and distance, safety and fear are never fixed. What is soft is never just gentle, what is familiar is never entirely safe. Birthdays are scary. My work exists in these quiet moments where truths reveal themselves.
My practice moves through these tensions, tracing the edges where tenderness meets discomfort and sweetness veils something more complicated. Through ceramic sculpture, found-object installation, printmaking, and fiber art, I transform the familiar into the unfamiliar, inviting dialogue around the subtle oscillations between the mundane and the uncanny. Working across materials that embody both fragility and endurance, my work examines how memory, materiality, and emotion intersect to tell stories of place, trauma, and transformation.
Risograph printing is used intentionally in this series due to its inherent instability. The process layers separate color drums that rarely align with perfect precision, producing soft misregistration where edges slip and overlap. This slight offset makes the forms appear to tremble, as if vibrating at a different frequency from the page itself. That instability reinforces the emotional tone of the series: celebration edged with anxiety, brightness edged with fragility. The prints feel mechanically reproduced yet subtly unsettled, allowing the images to hover between crisp graphic clarity and a kind of nervous shimmer.
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