Center for Craft

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| Craft is for everyone

Building a future for craft.

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Center for Craft

Center

| Building a future for craft

Building a future for craft.

Cowork

Grant Recipient

“The Steel Archive,” 2025, mild steel, 6 x 5 x 18 in. Photo credit: Sarah Meadows.

Ellyse Egan

Windgate-Lamar Fellowship

2026

Bio of the Artist

Ellyse Egan is an interdisciplinary artist working across drawing, sculpture, and photography, with a practice grounded in craft-based processes and material investigation. Her sculptural work centers on industrial craft methods to create steel sculptures and objects. Through slow, hands-on making, such as MIG welding and sanding metal, she builds a personal relationship with the material. Egan is interested in examining time, memory, and the physical traces of life.

Egan’s work is informed by metalworking traditions that value precision, repetition, and attention to material behavior. She engages steel as both a structural and expressive medium, allowing its strength, weight, and surface to be reflected in each work. Minimal, abstract compositions emerge through refinement and reduction, with marks intentionally left visible as evidence of labor and process.

Central to her practice is an ongoing inquiry into how craft processes shape what is preserved and transformed. Each welded form functions as both an object and a trace, holding the marks of time, decision making, and care. In dialogue with her drawing and photographic work, her sculptures reflect an interest in ephemerality within durable materials, reframing documentation as a living craft practice rooted in touch, attention, and material tradition.