Eileen Cubbage (b. 1976, Philadelphia, PA) holds an MFA in Painting from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in Illustration from Syracuse University. She has participated in residencies and exhibitions at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, New York Studio School Drawing Marathon, Pyramid Atlantic Paper Studio, Takt Kunstprojektraum Berlin, Textile Quintet at FAVElab Greece, Integrative Somatic Arts Certification at Unity Space Athens, Butoh Invasion at STOA Center for Body Art Studies in Sirence, Turkey, and Arthouse Pani in central Mexico.

She has worked as an educator, designer and illustrator, having taught at Moore College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, Fleisher Art Memorial, and SCAD Hong Kong/Savannah.

She is currently developing curriculum for somatic and movement-based performance drawing and designing a comprehensive digital archive on mark-making as a contemplative practice.

  • My work positions the body as both site and method—an active threshold where sensation, memory, and identity converge. Informed by somatic practice and theories of the skin as psychic boundary (Anzieu), I explore how abstraction functions not as escape from form, but as a way of sensing what cannot be fully named or stabilized.

    Through painting, textile, and video, I combine analog and digital processes: dyed and tufted surfaces are scanned, mirrored, distorted, and looped. These works do not depict the body, but carry its imprint—its rhythm, pressure, and absence. Surface becomes interface; texture becomes archive.

    Drawing from Butoh, phenomenology, and the writings of Michel Serres, my practice inhabits a space between rupture and repair, presence and erasure. It reflects a commitment to working from within the body—where materials guide transformation, and form is shaped through lived contact.

    I understand abstraction as a mode of inquiry, not resolution—an approach that invites viewers into a shifting perceptual field. The work resists closure, asking instead how form might hold complexity, vulnerability, and the traces of what’s been carried or let go.