Eli Backer

2023 Fall Session I

Group:Artists-In-Residence

Eli Backer

2023 Fall Session I

Eli Backer (b. 1992, Seattle) is an artist, composer, and engineer. Her practice is not media specific, carrying threads of memory, loss, and community across sculpture, design, photography, glass, printmaking, film, textiles, ceramics, metal, and music. She is driven by the people and machines she surrounds herself with, and is interested in the communities they form, even when just between two people. Constantly creating visual and audio records of life around her, these run through or parallel to her work, lifting the everyday past solely formal and experiential. A practicing DJ of 15 years, Backer’s sets balance past and present, capturing musical friendships and memories, while creating common space and dialogue with the crowd around her. On or off the dancefloor, her work offers peace, places of rest, escape, and safety. She fervently believes that sharing what is closest to her heart allows others to feel less alone in their struggles.

Three weeks after her birth, Backer moved to Bainbridge Island, and her work has been greatly informed by this geographically isolated upbringing, and the freedom and restrictions island subculture offers. She holds a MFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design, as well as a BS in Computer Engineering from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. She has taught university courses on memory and site, as well as at makerspaces on fabrication– from machine embroidery, to ceramic 3d printing, to circuit design and assembly, to printmaking, to metalworking. Before moving back to Bainbridge in the summer of 2022, she ran a print shop out of her home in rural Pennsylvania, where she endured the pandemic by sending a flurry of postcards and other ephemera, an aspect of her social practice which endures to this day.