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
