Artful Resilience
Artful Resilience by Elaine Fraticelli is a body of artwork and self publications centered around esteem building for any age. Stand tall in the face of adversity with powerful words, or be comforted by colorful encouragement. With sustainable values for the future, each item is created or includes reuse materials, is handmade in Fraticelli’s Missoula MT studio, and all materials are sourced locally. Build your best self in an uncertain world.
Values
The Product:
Local to Missoula Montana
Sustainable Reuse Materials
Handmade from start to finish
High quality and professional finish
The Message:
Human Dignity - a base of honor and respect for all fellow humans (including yourself)
Equity - fairness or justice in the way people are treated
Justice - the fair process of judging cases, redressing wrongs, and applying consequences
Liberty - to enjoy the same social, spiritual, political, and economic rights and privileges enjoyed by others in society without arbitrary or unjust interference
Community - any group of unique individuals linked by common descent, location, interests, historic experiences, skills, professions, beliefs, or policies
Sovereignty - a person or place who is independent, self governed, and free from external control by any supreme power
Why It Works
Visual art and language hold an enormous amount of power over each of us because we are deeply affected by our sensory environments. Putting meaningful designs on common everyday objects combines sustainable reuse practices with self empowerment and community change. Being aware of ourselves and then expressing our values to others through shared experiences is what creates resilience. That’s when we can heal and grow and move forward more effectively. That’s when we can really move mountains together instead of sliding down the same slopes over and over again.
Elaine Fraticelli
My work joins logic and emotions, reconstructing adversity in engaging and unfamiliar ways. Using different styles of art to push the boundaries of visual understanding, I illustrate the connection between the infinite expanse of nature and all the complexities of humanity. The resulting images are beautiful, evocative, unsettling, and cathartic all at once.
What keeps us going through the insurmountable pain of loss? Questioning what gives us hope, I combine images of current events and personal emotions, with natural symbols and beauty to explore grief and love. In my work realism and abstraction mix in unique ways with textural undertones and expressive paint emphasizes natural beauty in these potent compositions. Images of struggle or decay become tangible in this visual exploration; searching for breath, unfathomable love, resilience, and community.
Biography
Elaine Fratielli learned to love art from her grandmother Judy at an early age and used it to process difficult events through her adolescence. She got her BFA from the University of Montana in 2016 with lofty goals of someday exhibiting at the Venice Biennale in order to influence and heal the world with her art. Facing personal tragedy and grief soon after, her work and life became heavily political and she began applying psychological therapies to her art practice. After a year of personal activism and grief she was drawn to the question of human resilience and the human power of survival. Using the ability of art and media to access subconscious emotions, Fraticelli invites us to witness our own grief and hold it as proof we are capable of unfathomable love as we move forward; together.
“Art is a wound turned into light.”
~ Georges Braque
