behind the work

eza is the artist name of Elizabeth A Smith, working under casa de karma.

She has been making things for over forty years.

Not as a career path chosen and followed, but as the only way she has ever known how to make sense of the world. She is self-taught in every part of this — the image-making, the language, the way of seeing that holds them together — and none of it arrived through a program or a plan. It arrived through decades of paying attention.

Her work moves between softness and shadow, drawn from nature, memory, and the feeling that ordinary things are rarely only ordinary. Working across photography, written work, and visual storytelling, she builds environments rather than singular pieces — worlds with their own atmosphere, rhythm, and logic, made to be entered and returned to.

Three collections form the body of this work: Bramblebright, Beyond the Thicket, and Eldhollow. Each holds its own way of seeing, its own emotional register — but all are rooted in the same ground: deep feeling, transformation, and the strangeness that lives just beneath the surface of things.

The work has been shaped, in part, by significant personal transformation — change that altered not only what she made, but why and how she made it. That history is present throughout, woven quietly into every collection.

I have been making things my whole life, and I am still learning what they mean.
Thank you for being here while I find out.
— eza