Eliza Frensley is a print-based artist from Nashville, TN. She received her BFA in Printmaking from Tyler School of Art & Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia. The University of Tennessee School of Art welcomes Eliza Frensley to the University of Tennessee School of Art Printmaking Program.

As an undergraduate, Frensley was a Division I athlete, worked as a studio aide through Temple’s Disability Resources and Services Department, and completed an internship as a designer printer at Hatch Show Print. Post-undergrad, Frensley continued her work as a studio aide and expanded her portfolio as a member of the Second State Press FOB Holder Program.

Upon returning to Nashville, Frensley’s print was exhibited in the “Best of Tennessee Craft Biennial” at the Tennessee State Museum, where she participated in an artist panel discussion. In addition, she worked as a substitute teacher in Metro Nashville Public Schools and instructed a nine-week printmaking class at Nashville School of the Arts, a fine arts public high school.

Artist Statement

By utilizing a print-based medium to recreate snapshots of existing images, I create deceptively chaotic environments and complex montages while investigating the memory’s ability to blend fact with fiction, generating a visual suggestion of what cannot be perceived. My marks heighten emotional value by emphasizing the disconnect between my current psychic disposition and feelings of nostalgia aroused by viewing documented evidence of my life. Accordingly, my process rationalizes spatial and personal awareness, memory, and trauma recognition in an attempt to materialize a visual representation of dissociation and self-isolation. I am able to create a newly documented memory while emphasizing the physical process of depicting a metaphorical trauma, and I arrange atmospheric settings to provoke a sense of sentimentality or nervous apprehension, thus enabling a dialogue with myself and with my audience. These personal adjustments to the existing images are attempts to represent the effect of time on my memory while also recognizing and conveying the emotions I experienced at that period in my life.