About

I am a lifelong artist and have lived in Ithaca, NY for more than 30 years. I moved here in the early 90s from a crafts collective where I was a potter, graphic designer, cook, and an illustrator. My four kids have always explored and played right alongside me, all of us creating and delighting in anything colorful, sticky, beautiful, goopy, and unusual. 

While I will sometimes use other materials for my sculpted designs, paper is the queen since it’s both delicate and strong, able to hold a curve or a fold, can be light or heavy, and is infinitely shapeable and forgiving. 

My sculptures are a tribute to my love of the creatures and places we share this earth with. Each work is made from hundreds to thousands of hand-cut paper pieces. I’ve tried to streamline this process by machine-cutting feathers or leaves but, in their uniformity, they no longer feel natural. So I embrace cutting each feather or leaf individually and lean into the zone.

If you would like a custom order, please contact me at hello@carlaelizabeth.art.

“Also of particular interest are glass-boxed paper sculptures and fully freestanding pieces by Carla Elizabeth. The former are something genuinely distinctive in local art. Paying playful homage to the tradition of the insect specimen, Elizabeth amplifies scale, pattern, and color. Meanwhile, on the other side of the gallery, two cranes and a flamingo perch on one of the conservatory’s pianos. Made of such materials as papier-mâché, paper, polymer clay, and artificial flower petals over wire armatures, their straining for realism may strike more traditional gallery audiences as kitsch. Still, they are possessed with an engaging sense of animacy.”

- Arthur Whitman, Ithaca Times