Elysia Mann wants to change your perspectives — about life, about thinking, about almost everything.

According to Elysia Mann, her art 'embraces doubt as a way of knowing.'

Mann’s art practice — she is a weaver, printmaker, and poet — starts in her studio at Relay Ridge, a collaborative artist space in North Knoxville. A large second-hand LeClerc 8-shaft jack loom enjoys a second lease on life and dominates one corner; the walls and tables are dappled with ideas, thoughts, works in progress, prints, and finished weavings.

Mann’s medium-length chestnut hair frames her expressive heart-shaped face — she’s a midwestern-tinged doppelganger for Rachel McAdams — as she speaks with a charismatic sincerity about her art-making process.

“I want my work to be considered in the context of ‘slowness,’” says Mann — and one imagines her sitting in her loom, like Silas Marner, her “eyes bent close down on the slow growth of sameness.” 

Her previous works, such as those from her “We Am” series, are draped pieces suspended between pins, sagging under the weight of time, spun from colored warp and weft threads into contemporary folkloric tapestries.

Mann writes: “My work embraces doubt as a way of knowing — redundancy as a performance of doubt.” 

Doubt allows for a multiplicity of expressions, and those expressions are her flywheel to highlight and entertain many possibilities. 

Mann’s geometric and typographic weavings are artifacts of stillness borne of monotonous repetition — cascading abstractions are tenuously attached to their very existence, and yet the artist’s hand and the tightness of the weave appears to calm the disquieting dismay created by the impression that the object could fray and decay before our eyes. These fabric paintings are brave and defiant. A wonderful warmth is evident throughout that excludes the tension of separation.

Mann tried to follow the rules growing up Catholic in small-town rural Wayne, Neb., but an underlying rebellious nature revealed itself in middle school.

“I had my first art class in seventh grade,” she says. “I was so excited to be in a real art class, and we could draw whatever we wanted, but there couldn’t be words — that was the one rule — and that made me want nothing but words!”

It was an appropriate reaction from an artist who today cites as influences one of the mothers of modernity, Gertrude Stein; word art master Jenny Holzer; and environmental writer and activist Terry Tempest Williams.

Mann navigated a rare congenital childhood eye disease that resulted in surgeries beginning at age 5 to prevent the condition from spreading to her other eye — she has lived with single-eye vision for most of her life — and ended in the surgical removal of her right eye in 2020.

It’s no coincidence that her curiosity pulls her in different directions (“I do a lot of reading,” she says, “although not necessarily thoroughly or linearly”), and her professional and personal interests include neurocognitive science, laterality in the brain, and the psychology of perception.

Mann’s intellectual and artistic restlessness manifests first through her job as a printmaking studio technician at the University of Tennessee School of Art (she received her MFA in studio art printmaking in 2017 from UT after graduating in 2007 from Washington University in St. Louis with a bachelor’s in fine arts).

She keeps the 2-D printmaking facilities in operating condition, maintains and operates the presses and equipment, and serves as a resource to students in need of technical help. She also offers occasional workshops to demonstrate “cool weird things people may not know how to do,” such as how to create inkjet prints on thin Japanese paper for collage and how to make book cloth from fabric.

Mann has also worked previously over the past 15 years as the owner of All Along Press, a printmaking and letterpress studio in St. Louis, and as the press manager for Small Craft Advisory Press, an artists’ book press at Florida State University.

“My poetry professor at UT, Art Smith, once told me that ‘poetry is just juxtaposition,’” Mann says, and she has incorporated this idea into her impressive current weavings, including “Behold” (from the “Flag for the Ruins” series),” “Oh Boy Here We Go,” and “Land of Sighs and Laughter,” which are meant to be viewed front to back and back to front challenging the viewer to ask: “What else is going on”?

“I’m focused on rooting in community and in Knoxville,” she says. “I’m connected to Relay Ridge; my yoga practice; my day job at UT; my biological and chosen families; and Ruby, my ‘Tennessee Black Dog’ mutt, with whom I love to run in the early mornings, pre-dawn, at any number of Knoxville’s parks and trails.

“I want my work to function with additional layers of metaphor and meaning unfolding over time,” she says. “My work strives to be inviting but not simple, entertaining and alluring but not easily digestible. I want there to be beauty — I want to exist as a beacon of hopefulness within a framework of utopic inspiration — and for the work to grow on people over time.”