XXILLUS: A Sub Classification Within Lyccrophylli | Elise Puddy

Showing April 15 - 29, 2025

"Lyccrophylli is an ongoing collection of various series of abstract works. 

This collection is built on a foundation of separating the conception and material understanding of a work of art. I typically begin my work by asking questions concerning how I can choose to surrender control in any given expression. My “constraint” is to see how much control I can surrender while granting liberty to the materials themselves. I am attracted to the element of chance and working in a manner that prevents me from visualizing the result. 

I consider how to create an environment where the materials are free to communicate interdependently, given their own physical properties. I explore conglomerates of substances that are able to translate and register the available information. With the added element of chance, the aleatory nature of this work coalesces into an emergent language that is reliant on the ‘index’. It is the nature of this collection that it will always be made of direct “traces”. 

Fluid and ridged contours, transparencies and opacities manifest through a liberty granted to the media. The results feature erasures that allude to the physicality of the process while making inimitable and distinctive statements.  

What remains most captivating to me with this collection is the emergent language, it has chameleonlike or shapeshifting characteristics. It has an ability to change identity from; terrestrial to cosmic, atomic to macroscopic, biological to mineral, but still remain ambiguous with a capacity to cement a status as its own entity. The viewer becomes an essential part of my work, it is the viewers set of assumptions that gives meaning to this work."

About the Artist

Elise Puddy is the leading Lyccrologist concerned with the study of Lyccrophylli. She graduated from the University of Guelph with a Bachelor of Studio Art. In 2018 she created “Laccrophylliums” the first Lyccrophylli to be identified. Based in Ontario, she has kept a busy studio laboratory practice by amalgamating new types of Lyccrophylli. In November 2024, Puddy exhibited in a group show titled MYKOLOGICA III at Organ Kritischer Kunst Gallery in Berlin, Germany.

Puddy continues to conduct experiments, investigations and research studies on what Lyccrophylli is and what it needs to exist as an entity. She has studied many aspects of Lyccros from language, forms, reaction types, to fundamental observation modules. She has examined thin slices of various Lyccrophylli under a microscope to highlight and identify different structures within these entities.

Artwork Description

X. Ophora, approximately 132"x168" Lyccrophylli on textile, 2025