'Taxonomy' A new collaboration between Liz West and Mark Devereux

Taxonomy, - 2012

Taxonomy is the first piece of collaborative work between Liz West and Mark Devereux. This mixed media installation explores their joint interests in colour and light, bringing together West's interests in collecting and classification and Devereux's interest in scientific representations within art.

50cm x 50cm x 140cm

Mixed Media (acrylic, wood, capsuals, found substances)

www.markdevereux.co.uk  |  www.liz-west.com 

World Young Artist (Liz West Interviewed by Maude Magazine)

by Catherine Ailsa Jones

The first ever World Event Young Artists is opening in Nottingham this September. Showcased is the work from 1000 artists, from 100 countries.

Different media, different political ideologies, different languages–WEYA is a brilliant opportunity for international exchange on a global scale. Nottingham will not know what’s hit it.

We interviewed Manchester born artist Liz West, who has been selected.

Liz is best known for her intensely coloured installations, but also employs photography, drawing, and video to investigate notions of collecting and systemizing in relation to consumer items.



Do you think your work represents a British aesthetic, in relation to the art scene in the U.K, or perhaps the cultural associations of your work?
The UK economy is notoriously associated with disposable culture – many artists making work in the UK at the moment are using consumables and ‘ready-mades’ as inspiration or as materials; an artists’ immediate surroundings are always going to play into the work somehow. In my work I always refer to the domestic everyday environment through the type of throwaway plastic objects and materials I make my work with.

Tell us about the doll’s house piece you are exhibiting in the show.
Once my art college tutor told me that when you made a photographic slide, it should always look like a jewel; an intense burst of colour. I aim to make all my work applying the same theory – A little jewel: Something that you are inclined to investigate, move around, explore, are intrigued by, glows, is alluring. Repeated Everyday is sited within a 1/12-scale antique Edwardian doll’s house. The house was built by my parents and given to me twenty-two years ago on Christmas Day. I have played with it, loved it and intended at some point to decorate and furnish it throughout. With an urge to develop my Chamber installation work on various scales, I wanted to give the house a new identity.



Your work is filled with giddiness and excess, yet there is a subtlety and a quietness, maybe because of the spiritual associations that colour has. How much do you play with this tension?
As part of ‘Chroma’ (July 2012), I invited a colour therapy mediation group to ‘experience’ the work. This explored what it felt like to be surrounded by intense colour in a completely immersive environment. The meditation session had a profound affect on all attendee’s; it is not a regularity to be met with room’s completely drenched floor to ceiling in raw/pure colour. At the preview there was a lot of giddiness about the extreme use of colour, however the meditation event allowed for a more spiritial and quiet reaction.

With your chamber series you literally drench objects with colour. Your installations are immersive, they appeal to a sense of touch. Given that you work with the senses in this way, and also that you often refer to domestic items, for example in the trolley series, how far would you describe your stance as a feminist one?
I am not trying to be a feminist or make a comment on feminism. I make work and am interested in the domestic, but so are a lot of male artists. My biggest artistic inspirations are all men. Look at the work of David Batchelor; his work is all about creating tactile, sensory worlds using domestic items but because his is a man, he never gets labeled as having a feminist stance.

How does your identity as the world record holder for the biggest Spice Girls collection inform your art?
It informs my ideas of how to make a collection successfully, which I then utilize in my work as an artist. Many of my ideas and interests include objects en-mass in one form or another – mostly mass-produced colourful detritus. Spice girls ephemera (which I started collecting as an 11 year old) is also brightly coloured, mass-marketed, mass-produced throw-away commodities. There is a clear link between the two; one is just a more nature version of the other. 
My identity as Liz West: Spice Girls collector rarely overlaps with Liz West: artist in terms of what audience I am entertaining. To me, popular culture and art (possibly identified as high-culture) are different things – they should remain separate in terms of cultural standing, yet meet occasionally for a brief moment to inform each other. At the end of the day I want people to take me seriously as a (emerging and contemporary) visual artist.

Would you say your work is more about collecting, or a statement about consumer excess–or both?
It has to be about both. You can’t reference one without the other. I collect manufactured objects as they are an attractive raw material to work with and because they are readily available en mass. They come in all sorts of interesting shapes, sizes and colours. As an artist who chooses to use them, I am of course aware of the inevitable association with consumer excess. Growing up in a throwaway society everything seemed to be mass-produced and increasingly made of plastic, rather than wood or other more traditional materials used by previous generations. Whether my use of plastic objects and materials, so associated with my generation, is a direct statement on consumerism or simply a pragmatic reflection of the times in which we live, I am not sure.


LIZ WEST WILL BE…..exhibiting in Beyond the Material World at Bar Lane Gallery in York in October, conceived and curated by the International Association of Quantum Artists.

World Event Young Artists 2012 is hosted by UK Young Artists and supported by Arts Council England, Cultural Olympiad East Midlands, Nottingham Trent University and Nottingham City Council.

www.worldeventyoungartists.com
www.liz-west.com

World Event Young Artists @ Bonington Gallery, Nottingham (7-15 Sept))

 

 

World Event Young Artists (WEYA) is the first of its kind and will take place in the cultural city of Nottingham, England in September 2012. This global event will showcase a selection of the best international creative talent, across a spectrum of artforms, in one city, providing an opportunity for 1000 artists from 100 nations to join together and share their creativity on an international platform. The World Event will be a chance for international exchange on a global scale, bringing the city to life; it is as much about intercultural dialogue across political borders as it is about the practice of young artists.

This unique combination of factors will ensure an unforgettable experience for all who take part and its audiences. Its public programme and web resources will offer space for collaborative development, workshops, debates and symposiums across a mixture of structured and informal settings. Artists will take part in workshops and interactive engaging sessions which will be delivered by an exciting range of creative individuals and artform specialists, exclusively tailored for young artists of the 21st century.

This once in a lifetime event will thrive on discussion and collaboration with like minded artistic talents from across the globe and aims to encourage future partnerships.

World Event Young Artists 2012 is hosted by UK Young Artists and supported by Arts Council England, Cultural Olympiad East Midlands, Nottingham Trent University and Nottingham City Council.


BONINGTON GALLERY
Friday 7th September 2012 - 10:00 - Sunday 16th September 2012 - 18:00

Nottingham Trent University

As part of the WEYA exhibitions and events, NTU’s Bonington building will be hosting a variety of visual arts, moving image, jewellery and fashion. We will be presenting 42 international and national artists, including selected recent graduates of BA (Hons) Fine Art and Photography from NTU.

Ira Skopljak - Bosnia
Nelisa Bazdar - Bosnia
Fabricio Lopez - Brazil
Laura Sanz - Brazil
Kim Hak - Cambodia
Samuel Mercure - Canada
Bingbing Cheng - China
Yao Liang - China
Jiang Luo - China
Jingjing Jia - China
Yan Jin - China
Yanwei Gong - China
Naoki Miyasaka - Japan
Anastasiya Markelova - Russia
Questal Tay - Singapore
Julia Castaño - Spain
Aimee Betts - UK
Farniyaz Zaker - UK
Grace Page - UK

Liz West - UK

Nicholas William Hughes - UK
Rob Reed - UK
Tom De Freston - UK
Diego Andres Peña Gonzalez - Uruguay
Hui Luo - China
Alice Gale Feeny - UK
Alice Georgina Thickett - UK
Laura Jane Blake - UK
Jelena Kostica - Serbia
Yixuan Chen - China
Katie Colclough - UK
Paul B Johnson - UK
Sarah Barber - UK
Rui Wang - China
Mohanakrishnan Haridasan - India
Tarek Korkomoz - Lebanon
Paola Valeria Montoya - Mexico
Juan Manuel Calvo -Spain
Emily Macinnes - UK
Marcelo Pérez del Carpìo - Bolivia
Qianru Wang - China
Studio Azzurro/Ramona Zordini - Italy

Housed within the School of Art and Design is the Bonington Gallery, one of the foremost spaces for contemporary art in the Midlands. The School presents a number of exhibitions throughout the year as part of a comprehensive programme of visual arts and design events. Exhibitors include national and international artists and designers, current students and staff from within the University and NTU alumni. Exhibitions are also presented in the impressive atrium of the Bonington Building which houses the school and gallery.

Summer Newsletter

Hello,

I would like to start by thanking everyone for their support towards my first major solo exhibition Chroma, which took place at BLANKSPACE in Manchester over the month of July. An overwhelming number of people attended the exhibition and related events including the preview and artist talk. If you missed it, images of the work can be seen on my website over the next few weeks. Alternatively you can take a look on my Flickr page.

I was so glad to be given the opportunity to make three new ambitious site-specific works within the gallery. Thanks to Mark Devereux for curating the exhibition, Arts Council England and all those that supported my crowd funding project.

There are only a few limited edition Chroma exhibition catalogues left which can be purchased for £10 through my website or by clicking HERE.

Below is a quick update of various exhibitions and events that I am involved with in next few months. Exciting times ahead!

Cheers,

Liz

---

Press

The Independent on Sunday

 

I am very excited to tell you that my entire series of six Trolley photographs will feature in The Independent on Sunday Magazine this week (26 August). Holly Williams’ article Young, Gifted and British offers a sneak preview of some of the best home-grown talent taking part in World Event Young Artists next month in Nottingham.

Williams writes, “…More cheerful are Liz West’s images. A tutor at Glasgow School of Art once told her that every photographic slide should look “like a jewel” – and hers certainly shine brightly. This is serious colour-blocking: the 27-year-old contrasts different masses of uniformly hued objects in a supermarket to make an aesthetic experience out of a consumerist chore.”

---

Exhibition

World Event Young Artists

Exhibition runs from 7th - 15th September

I shall be participating in World Event Young Artists 2012 taking place across venues in Nottingham. My work will be exhibited in Nottingham Trent University’s Bonington Gallery.

World Event Young Artists is the very first event of its kind to take place. It is an exciting occasion bringing together and celebrating the talent and artistic excellence of young people from across the globe. In September 2012 World Event for Young Artists will bring a staggering 1,000 young artists (18 – 30 years) from 120 nations to Nottingham. Over a period of 10 days, artists will bring the city to life with creative activity across all art forms including visual arts, music and gastronomy. These artists will have the chance to showcase their practice, exchange ideas and build future collaborations.

www.​ntu.​ac.​uk/​boningtongallery

Bonington Gallery
Nottingham Trent University
Bonington building
Dryden Street
Nottingham
Nottinghamshire
NG1 4GG

 

---

Exhibition

International Association of Quantum Artists

 

Beyond the Material World

Exhibition runs from 20th October – 3rd November

The IAQA is a contemporary art collective exploring the idea of artistic visions which intuitively reach beyond this three-dimensional, material world to explore alternative possible realities through taking a positive approach. This collective are pleased to announce their first exhibition at Bar Lane Gallery in York. The show will explore the statement Beyond the Material World and aims to be inspirational and encouraging others to reach out towards a more positive and sustainable future.

Works featured will move away from dominating fixed theories and measures of conventional science. We are taking the view that art can be viewed as a platform for multiple expressions of social ideals; where art and science co-exist harmoniously. The exhibition strives to have a holistic and egalitarian approach which asks all who participate how we can construct a new outcome or world view together. The works considered provide positive, awe inspiring futures rather than promoting any apocalyptical visions.

http://iaqa.blogspot.co.uk/

Bar Lane Studios

150 Micklegate

City Centre

York

YO1 6JX

---

Exhibition 

Rogue Open Studios

Launch 28th September. Continues 29th – 30th September.

It is my pleasure to invite you to this year’s Open Studios at Rogue Artists Studios in Manchester. Join me for the opening night and continuing over the whole weekend. Open Studios allows you a peek behind the doors (or curtains) of artists at work.

Once a year Rogue opens it’s doors to the public in it’s Open Studios event inviting fellow artists, curators and the general public to access all areas of the studios while affording members an opportunity to exhibit and offer work for sale.

This year's Rogue Open Studios is over the weekend of September 29th/30th with the opening party on Friday September 28th from 6-9pm. Opening hours over the weekend are 12pm-5pm Saturday and 12pm-4pm Sunday. Looking forward to seeing you then.

http://www.rogueartistsstudios.co.uk

Rogue Artists' Studios & Project Space

66-72 Chapeltown Street

Piccadilly

Manchester

M1 2WH