Elif Uras

Elif Uras (b. Ankara) attended Brown University and Columbia Law School before receiving a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA from Columbia School of the Arts. Elif Uras’s practice spans ceramics, drawing and painting.

In her works, Uras explores how clay carries cultural memory across time. She often employs labour-intensive, intricate patterns on her surfaces inspired by diverse art historic sources, including Prehistoric art, antiquity, Islamic geometry, Iznik tiles and Western modernism. Her work also engages with questions of tradition, ornament and labour, especially feminised labour.

Often working on location in Iznik (Nicaea), where the most renowned tiles and ceramics of the Ottoman Empire were produced centuries ago, Uras produces works in ceramic that often incorporate the non-figurative visual vocabulary of Iznik with the female body. Gilded female figures populate the surfaces of her ceramics, engaged in acts of caregiving, domestic work, agriculture, and heritage crafts like weaving and pottery. Uras transforms these undervalued activities into expressions of resilience and resistance, rendering them timeless through mythic form. 

Uras’s works have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum, MoMA PS1, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Gardiner Museum, Toronto, MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain, 9th Shanghai Biennale and Victoria and Albert Museum. Uras’s works are included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum and Istanbul Modern. 

Elif Uras lives and works between New York, Istanbul and Iznik.