Artoberfest Judged Show & Competition

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Paul Travis Phillips is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, altered objects, installation, performance, and writing. His practice engages language as both subject and material, drawing from discarded or suppressed sources—banned books, abandoned texts, and cultural residue—to examine how knowledge is formed, fractured, and carried.

Approaching art as a recursive process of material and philosophical inquiry, Phillips develops work that resists resolution, favoring slowness, instability, and sustained attention over clarity and consumption. His projects foreground moments where systems of knowledge begin to break down—where understanding slips, abstractions take hold, and the illusion of understanding settles in—revealing the conditions that shape what can be known, said, or preserved, and holding those conditions open for further inquiry.

He is an Associate Professor of Art at Elon University. Across studio, text, and teaching, his work sustains a long-term investigation into intellectual resilience, authorship, and the structures through which ideas take form.