Eli Savage

When I first started drawing regularly, I filled my sketchbooks with images of distorted, unreal bodies: animals that didn’t exist, matrices of disembodied limbs, bodies that stretched and bulged and bent in ways they should not. Making art was, for me, a way of temporarily escaping my awareness of having a body, but the content of my work always snapped back to representations of it.  

The motifs and concepts in the art I make have not changed much, but the attitudes I express about those concepts have zigzagged considerably through the years. In some pieces, being inside a body is an inescapable horror, like in Damocles (Push Up): I am struggling through a push-up, with spikes coming up through the floor under me that are just beginning to dig into my ribs. In others, there’s a tentative sense of wonder and awe, like in Self-portrait. Others still are just neutrally accepting and exploring the strangeness of being an organic, physical, mortal thing.