Beth Elliott’s art practice pulls from her formal education in biochemistry and landscape architecture and her education of art has been through self teaching, intuitive exploration and intentional study over the past 20+ years. The intersection of her studies of the microscopic architecture of the cell and her design education which spatially investigates the land macroscopically, all play a part in her art works. All of these educational foundations heavily influence her visions and forms in sculpture, but her art is intentionally directed away from the precision that both science and architecture require. To have the freedom to create with abandon and explore with unfettered curiosity is essential to her artwork. The core of her art practice has been working with clay for the past decade, but her creative endeavors encompass sculpture, painting, and installation art. 

Inspired by the process of creating, it is the learning and studying of materials and incorporating their properties and nuances into her pieces is an ongoing part of her work. There is textural significance to her art while creating interpretable as well as abstract forms. Other materials find their way into the sculptural work with or without the balance of clay. She works often in series, chasing a feeling until it can be resolved and reflected in the vessel and in nuances revealed by repetition in the series. It is this process of making that she is most connected to. Her pieces are sculptural as well as illustrative, and they are driven instinctively by the connections that Beth feels occurring as the work is created. The addition or subtraction of illustrative layers, subtle textures, the addition of artifacts arising from cutting apart the vessels gives each object an individual and identifiable sense of space, while reducing the vessel and its surface design to simple, modest, representational forms. Oftentimes surface markings on the vessels can be attributed to a specific mood, but they also reflect the rough outline of a story or landscape that develops during the building of the forms. The markings are simple in form and free in their making, and are Beth’s private and public lexicon and response to the external world.