Eric Eley struggles with illusion. He doesn’t like it. He’s a facts man, and the depth in his resin drawings is literal depth, with pigment embedded in layers of resin.

^{Plane Drift, resin and dry pigment, 2007}

“I’m showing you what I want to show you,” he says of his outer-spacey geometric abstractions, which share affinities with Julie Mehretu’s works. These are maps only of themselves, he likes to say. “This isn’t a piece of a larger world.”

He used to be certain about that. But now, his lines, points, and planes are beginning to lead off the edges of his drawings and to fade away into deep space—and he’s trying to figure out why, and whether he likes it, and where he wants it to go.

This is an artist who started by making teapots and became a professional seamstress (seamster?) before he studied in the MFA ceramics program at UW.

His newest works are at Platform Gallery in Pioneer Square through February 9, including this drawing, titled In Place of Three (2008)—the dry pigment is applied with makeup applicators—

and the installation/spatial drawing Prospect Fields, which fills the gallery.

Listen in.