This paper and fiber artist incorporates people’s desires into large-scale, colorful and often three-dimensional works.
by Liza Roberts
For Charlotte artist Elizabeth Palmisano, inspiration comes from many sources: the material she works with, often handmade paper and fiber; her community, which includes students, fellow artists and complete strangers; and lately and most importantly, from a deeply felt calling to collect and transform the hopes and wishes of those people into art.
That art is often three-dimensional and always colorful. It typically makes a bold statement through scale, composition or unexpected materials, but does so disarmingly, with a beguiling beauty. Her work has been exhibited at Charlotte’s Mint Museum and McColl Center, and Palmisano has twice been voted Best Visual Artist by Charlotte’s Queen City Nerve newspaper.
It’s not surprising that her community — which she incorporates into nearly everything she does — loves her back. As a self-described wishkeeper, Palmisano has been actively collecting their anonymously submitted wishes to use in her art for the last few years, most recently gathering more than 1,000 handwritten ones to incorporate into a massive, multidimensional mural on Charlotte’s 36th Street. Completed in September, NoDa Cloud Wall transforms a 23,000-square-foot parking garage wall into a colorful skyscape featuring three-dimensional clouds inscribed with those wishes.
“It’s really beautiful to see all the similarities that people have, from all walks of life,” she says. “We all kind of want the same things: Always love, then wishes for family, or for children. Love and family are always first. It’s wild to me how vulnerable people will be if you give them an anonymous spot to ask for what they want.” The pandemic started it all, she says. “It was really hard for me,” she says.
“I’m an artist with a capital A first and foremost, but I teach classes and workshops because I love being with people. And I couldn’t do anything like that. So this was my way to collaborate with people without being in the same room. I asked them to digitally submit a wish, and it could be anonymous, and I was going to make a piece of art for each wish submitted. Those were my first wishes, 58 wishes, and I created a piece of art for each one.”
One recent morning, at uptown’s McColl Center, Palmisano was busy printing a limited series of card decks that feature her artwork alongside wishes and affirmations: “I love fiercely, beginning and ending with myself” was one. She jokes that her focus on affirmations and wishes allows her to be “a professional fairy princess at 40 years old,” but “because I’m an artist, I can get away with it.”
Still, so much outward, public focus can take an artist away from her own center, her own source of creativity. A recent fellowship at the McColl Center, during which she made paper vessels and curated an exhibit, Liminal Divine, that included her work and that of six other McColl fellows, inspired her to look back within. “I want to make art for me for at least the next six months or so,” she says. “So I’m diving really deeply back into my handmade paper and fibers.” The paper vessels at McColl and a recent commission to create a 60-foot-long piece of handmade paper and fiber to hang indoors allowed her to return to the delicate medium that she started with.
As a child in South Carolina and as a young adult living on her own without a high school diploma, Palmisano not only had no access to art materials, she didn’t know “artist” was something someone could be. “I grew up in poverty, in a culture of poverty,” she says. “I had to use upcycled materials. I had no choice.” Those roots underpin everything she does today. The first time she took discarded scraps of paper and fiber and reworked them entirely into a piece of handmade paper and sold it at an art show, she says, it was a revelation; she felt she’d performed a work of alchemy. “It made me think of the way I grew up and where that came from,” Palmisano says. “Using someone else’s trash. You figure it out when you have no other choice. You can’t say, ‘I’m not going to eat today.’ Or, ‘I’m just not going to get to work today.’ Or, ‘I’m just not going to have clean clothes today.’ You figure it out. And I think that has served me well.”
In late 2019, when she filled a giant wall at the Mint Museum with Incantation, an ethereal, abstracted skyscape made of handmade paper, paint and collage, it was the first time many viewers had encountered fiber art in a blue-chip museum. “Boundary-pushing” is how the museum described the piece, both for its use of recycled materials and for “breathing new life into objects not typically considered for use in the creation of art.” It’s clear that the process of taking something discarded, breaking it down to its elements, and reworking it into something valuable and beautiful is not just empowering for Palmisano, it’s metaphoric.
And it’s always new. “Right now, I’m leaning deep into: ‘what do I want to make?’ I’ve got a lot of experimentation underway,” she says. “In the spring, I’m sure there’ll be something. I’ll be excited,
like a kid walking up and handing you a dandelion they just picked: ‘Here’s my offering.’ Good work takes time, and I really want to give myself that time, because I want to continue to be able to do this work.”
This article originally appeared in the February 2025 issue of WALTER magazine