Liz West Introduces her new Studio Manager: Emma Colledge

I am so proud to introduce to you to my new studio manager Emma Colledge. She is an huge asset to my studio team. I thought you would like to get to know her a little so I asked her to answer some questions about what makes her tick... Enjoy!

DOB: 27.06.1992
From: Preston, Lancashire  

1.  Do you have a favourite colour? Why? 
Purple. Fun fact: purple dye was discovered when trying to invent a cure for Malaria.  

2. Which is your favourite work of Liz's? Why? 
Through No.3. I experienced it first hand on my daily commute to work and it never failed to brighten my day.     

3. Where do you find inspiration? 
In people, rather than places. I read a lot of autobiographies by funny people or have a rant with friends.      

4. What did you train in? 
I studied Drama at University of Manchester, focusing on production and playwriting.   

5. What did you do before? 
I’ve worked as a producer for a site-specific theatre company and as a project manager for visual arts events. 

6. What do you do in your spare time? 
I started climbing (bouldering) last year, so spend a lot of my spare time trying not to fall off walls.  

7. Do you have a favourite quote? 
“Decide what your currency is early. Let go of what you will never have.” (Amy Poehler)  

8. What song is your current obsession or what music are you listening to? 
I listened to Wanderer Wandering by Slow Club roughly 15 times yesterday. The rest of the time I’m listening to a back catalogue of Woman’s Hour and Desert Island Discs podcasts, because I’m slowly turning into my mother.  

9. In your opinion, what is the most important issue facing the arts today? 
Across the sector, it’s funding and how broader cuts are undermining the value contributed by the arts. But ensuring your practice is commercially viable can be both a necessary evil and a source of creative opportunities.    

10. What is the biggest risk you have ever taken? 
Often putting adventure before stability – but you only live once!  

11. Have you ever experienced creative block? If so, how did you overcome it? 
Yes, all the time. For me, it’s accepting defeat, taking a step away from it and trusting that you’ll get it when you come back to it refreshed. Even if that has to be 6am the following morning.  

12. Who are your favourite artists or practitioners? 
Two physical theatre companies, Rash Dash and Theatre Ad Infinitum.

Liz West - Coming up this Spring

Through No. 3, 2015. Photo credit: Adam Pester Photography

Spring is coming... 

I have been overwhelmed with your kind responses to my first public art commission Through No. 3. Originally destined to only be shown for 6 weeks over the Christmas period, the work is on view indefinitely in Spinningfields, Manchester. If you are in Manchester over the next few months, be sure to track it down, especially if it is a rare sunny day! 

I am delighted to have recently been shortlisted for this years Aesthetica Art Prize and will be exhibiting work in the Art Prize exhibition Opening on 13 April at York St. Mary's. Having been chosen to receive one of the RBS Bursary Awards, I will be showing brand new work in the Royal British Society of Sculptors Bursary group exhibition, previewing on 16 March. Also, I am honoured to have my work presented in a new Thames & Hudson publication 'Lumitecture: Illuminating Interiors For Designers & Architects' by Anna Yudina, which is out now. 

Over the Spring months there will be several opportunities to see and experience my work. Below I have listed some upcoming opportunities that you may be interested in. You can find more information about my work by visiting www.liz-west.com.

New Site-Specific Installation



Liz will be artist-in-residence and unveiling a brand new installation at Light + Building in Frankfurt on 14th and 15th March.

Complementary Saturation is a new site-specific spatial installation exploring the relationship between complementary colours and on the people experiencing them. The work has been commissioned by the International Association of Lighting Designers and sponsored by Lumenpulse.

Liz will be giving a free artist talk as part of the IALD's Lighting Perspectives seminar at 10.45am on 14th March. Click HERE for more information.












 

Upcoming Group Exhibition

Liz will be showing new works in the Royal British Society of Sculptors (RBS) Bursary exhibition. Each year the RBS Bursary Awards are given to 10 early career artists working in 3 dimensions judged to be of outstanding talent. Integral to the society’s aim to promote the diverse language of contemporary sculpture, the Bursary Awards provide a platform to emerging sculptors to realise their full potential in the professional sphere.  

Preview: 16 March 2016, 6.30 - 8.30pm. Open from 17 March - 20 May 2016, Wednesday - Friday 12.30 - 5.30pm (or by appointment).


 

Shortlisted for Art Prize

Liz has been shortlisted for this years Aesthetica Art Prize and exhibition. Showcasing cutting-edge practice from today’s ground-breaking contemporary artists.

Celebrating individual mediums whilst recognising the richness of interdisciplinary practice, the 2016 selection is distributed across the categories of Photographic and Digital Art; Painting and Drawing; Three Dimensional Design and Sculpture, and Video, Installation and Performance. Open from 14 April - 31 May 2016 at York St. Mary's.




Work in New Publication

Liz has work presented in the new Thames & Hudson publication Lumitecture: Illuminating Interiors for Designers and Architects which was released on 29 February. Author Anna Yudina not only pursues the question, "What is light?" but also offers insight on 200 projects that demonstrate its transformative power.

Yudina has organised the book around three sections. First, there's light as it transforms space. Second, Yudina addresses lighting that alters one's perception of time. Finally, the author taps into light's power over emotion. Within each section, sub-categories like "color power" and materialization, daylight and contrast, all factor in. The work is comprehensive and up-to-date but its most powerful attribute is the revelation of light's true potential.







Commission Awarded

Take A Part CIC, Stonehouse Action and Stonehouse community members are thrilled to announce that artist Liz West has been commissioned to develop a new exciting public artwork to respond to the diversity and heritage in Stonehouse, Plymouth.
Liz West was selected via a co-commissioning process with Take A Part CIC, Stonehouse Action and Stonehouse Action’s community members leading to a co-written artist brief which outlined the aims of a commissioned public artwork - the need for humour, warmth, playfulness, spectacle and permanence. Out of numerous applications from the UK and Europe, Stonehouse Action members selected the artist Liz West."

Take A Part CIC Director Kim Wide says, ‘We are thrilled to have Liz working with us on this project which will be vibrant and reflective of the area’s past and future.’ The commission will be completed by June 2016.







 

Exhibition Announcement

Liz West has been awarded Arts Council England Grants for the Arts funding towards a forthcoming major solo exhibition Our Colour Reflection at 20-21 Visual Arts Centre in Scunthorpe, opening in May 2016.  

For Our Colour Reflection Liz will present an ambitious new installation using hundreds of coloured mirrors to transform the Neo-Gothic interior of the former St John’s Church building. The work will both reflect viewers as they look  at the work, and send colour up into the roof-space of the historic building – creating a dialogue between viewer, artwork and architecture. Exact dates and more information to follow shortly.


In the Press
Liz's work has recently been featured in several international publications and online editorial. Here are links to a few articles that have featured work which you might be interested in reading:

Mondo*Arc Magazine p.35-36
Total Lighting Magazine p. 20-21
ATTITUDE Interior Design Magazine
Architectural Lighting Magazine
The Creators Project
FRAME Magazine
Young Artists in Conversation (YAC)  

Feature in Attitude Interior Design Magazine (Jan/Feb 2016)

Thank you to Attitude Interior Design Magazine for this wonderful 4-page feature on my current practice.

Photographs of Through No.3 in Spinningfields

Image credit: MDP Photography

Exhibitions & Events in March

Your Colour Perception  

Your Colour Perception was installed in Castlefield Gallery’s 5000 square feet New Art Spaces Federation House fourth floor gallery in Manchester for a 2-day only exhibition on 31st January and 1st February. The work was developed in direct response to the space prior. West reacted to the architectural space using colour and light to create vast immersive installation art. 

West transformed Federation House into a sensory, visceral experience by overloading it with artificial chromatic light in which to test the psychological, physical, emotional and spiritual responses visitors experience during their encounter. This work utilises the darkness outside to raise the strength of the illumination and colouration in the work. Using this enormous space to install a light work in the darkest Winter months allowed the colour to bleed with more saturation than if displayed any other time of the year. 

Amongst the appreciation for Your Colour Perception were articles on BBC News: The Big Picture, Frame Magazine, urdesign mag, Professional Lighting Design Magazine, Illumni, Creative Boom, The Creator's Project, Hi Home Magazine (Russia), Trendland and Design Boom to name a few. As a result Liz will be collaborating with the International Association of Lighting Designers and BDP in April for an artists talk in Manchester. Details to follow.    

Unnatural Pleasures, Radiant Space, Plymouth 
27 February - 17 April 

The latest in the R[eff]uge series, supported by Arts Council England and Plymouth University, UNNATURAL PLEASURES focuses on synthesised experiences and the discomfort which is often the unfortunate by-product of attempts to comfort ourselves through man-made items. Liz West has made new site-specific work Complementary Afterimage which uses multiple fluorescent sticklights to create intense colour blocks flooding the entire space with purple light. Featuring work by Liz West, Alana Tyson, David Sargeant, Johanna Schmeer and Yvette Hawkins.   

Subjective Mixtures #1, Bloc Projects Billboard Commission, Sheffield 
2 - 30 March  

Liz West’s new work Subjective Mixtures #1 was created in situ for the Bloc Billboard on Jessop Street, Sheffield. West explores drawing as something not confined to two dimensions. During the creation of her work, whether making arrangements of objects and lights or drawing on paper, she uses elements of composition and arrangement to experiment with colour and space, often creating work is that is harmonious with its surroundings and examines our own deeply entrenched relationships to colour. 

West uses light as a material that radiates outside of its boundaries and containers, highlighting its significance within our understanding of colour. Her interventions and installations forge new spaces and environments, in which colour floods a physical site through a rich layering of light or disrupts the flatness of white paper.    

Through - Liz West, &Model, Leeds 
 11 - 29 March 

Within physical architectural spaces, Liz West uses light as a material that radiates outside of its boundaries and containers. She playfully refracts light through using translucent, transparent or reflective materials, directing the flow of artificial light. These ephemeral interventions forge new spaces and environments, by flooding a physical site with a rich mixture of light. This project forms part of a recent series of spatial light works based on the artist’s research into colour theory and light fields. The saturated light in this work casts sumptuously vivid colour reflections out of its containing space, through the windows, and reflects onto the road below. In the evening the darkness outside raises the strength of the illumination and the colour intensity in the work. 

This work will be viewable from outside the gallery only.     

No Grey Areas, Ha Ha Gallery, Southampton
28 February - 14 March

A group exhibition in black and white featuring new monochrome work by Liz West. No sweet fades or indefinite transitions of colour. A sophisticated stripping down with the saturation off and the contrast from one to the other is complimentary and resolute. 


Fingers Crossed Pt.2, The Engine Room, Manchester
13 March

The second in a three part series of one-night-only group exhibitions featuring new work by Liz West. Each exhibition explores different approaches to luck, chance, accidents, fate, coincidence and superstition as a subject or a part of the creative process.  

 

 

Time Lapse Video of Your Colour Perception Installation

Time lapse video of my work Your Colour Perception showing the saturation of colour increase as day turns into night.

Liz West - Your Colour Perception - Solo Exhibition

Equal amount of blue #2 (detail)
112 x 112 cm, hand-cut strips of 300gsm card

Your Colour Perception is Liz West’s largest site-specific installation to date, incorporating all 5000 square feet of Castlefield Gallery’s New Art Spaces Federation House fourth floor. The exhibition will include new work developed in direct response to the space prior. West will react to the architectural space using colour and light to create vast immersive installation art.   

This exhibition is the culmination of West’s ideas and works since being artist-in-residence at Kurt Schwitters Merz Barn on the Cumbrian Cylinders Estate in October 2014. Your Colour Perception includes new light work as well as works-on-paper and drawings.

This presentation of new work will open on Friday 30th January (6-9pm) and remain open on Saturday 31st January and 1st February between 2-8pm, intentionally utilising the darkness outside to raise the strength of the illumination and colouration in the work. Using the enormous space to install a light work in the darkest Winter months will allow the colour to bleed with more saturation than if displayed any other time of the year.    

Fourth Floor Gallery 

Federation House 

Manchester 

M4 2AH  

Open 2-8pm Saturday and Sunday  

www.liz-west.com 

2014: My Year in Review

As we all try and combat the January blues (again), I find it a useful pick-me-up to reflect on the previous year hoping that it will serve up some interesting revelations.

2014 was a productive year for me; I entered the year being not quite sure what it was going to deliver (the same with any year), but as time passes more and more opportunities raise their head to me.

In January I was trying to focus on my studio practice and hit a massive creative block. I decided that in order to overcome this, I would start a daily project - I nicknamed this 'The Construction Project'. I would make, document and take apart a new idea every day I visited my studio, I would then write about the work on my blogs. This was a hugely useful experience as not only did it get my creative juices flowing again, it also allowed me to practice my writing skills.

Day 22 of my Construction Project

At the end of January I installed my work Vanishing Boundaries in The Studios at MediaCityUK as part of Future Cities and Quays Culture Sculpture Series in collaboration with Mark Devereux Projects. During its residency, I gave an artists talk at Salford University; I love doing talks, maybe its because I enjoy what I do, like talking and am comfortable with an audience (I wanted to be a Spice Girls as a youth and a ballerina or actress as a teen - this explains a lot!).

Vanishing Boundaries at MediaCityUK

In February I traveled to g39 in Cardiff as co-director of Mark Devereux Projects to take part in an In Conversation as part of the WARP programme. This trip was the first of many, in 2014 I saw more new spaces, met more people and visited more new places that ever before, this can not be a bad thing!

In March my proposal for an exhibition at Exeter Pheonix' Gallery 333 was successful and I set about fabricating, packing and instructing a new site-specific work to be shown for the month. It was the first time I have shown work in the South-West, I always enjoy hearing the responses of a new audience. As a result, my work was featured on the cover of the regional magazine Exeter Living. In the meantime I clambered on with my Construction Project, blogging daily.

In April I spent a lot of time in the studio and even more time perfecting my writing skills. I was startling to get better and felt more confident.

May brought some sunshine and also my first public outing for a couple of months; I presented my work for Cornerhouse's Show & Tell event alongside other North-West based practitioners and creatives. It was a fun day, but as always, it went too fast! As well as this, the long-awaited publication featuring my work and written by Jac Scott was released, The Language of Mixed Media Sculpture is an reference book including the work of 28 international artists. Before the Summer kicked off I was also commissioned by Adobe to create a digital artwork to help launch their new version of Creative Cloud.

June and July were a write-off! I indulged myself in a couple of family trips - one of which being my Hen-weekend in Carsingson Village and a week away with my mum in one of my most favourite places in the world: Southwold. My wedding followed in early July and then a honeymoon in Italy. Staying in Limone on Lake Garda and trips to Florence and Verona were culturally and artistically delicious. However, I did manage to slip in one cheeky artistic outing thanks to Turf Projects who commissioned me to make a crazy golf hole for their 9-hole PUTT PUTT #2 extravaganza in Croydon.

Colour Intervals in PUTT PUTT #2

As soon as our flight landed at Manchester airport in August my phone was ringing... I had been commissioned by Eden Arts to make a new work for Kendal Calling music festival in Cumbria as part of their Arts Council England funded Woodland Arts Trail. It was a fantastic opportunity to test a new work in the great outdoors. It rained all weekend, the music was good, the pies were even better and the work survived 4 horrendously wet days and nights. Success?

Beyond Space at Kendal Calling

In August I also took part in Bury International Summer School; a wonderful 5 days were spent getting to know great people. I must say that the food was amazing (thanks to Sue Trehy) and kept all our minds concentrated throughout. I made some wonderful connections which will hopefully lead to some AMAZING projects this year! Please watch this space...

At the end of August and throughout September I helped lead several workshops for LeftCoast in Blackpool. The aim was to share ideas with the great people of Blackpool to illuminate their bikes and dogs for two separate events: Ride The Lights and LumiDogs. I was also commissioned to design and light up loads of bikes for the event in which 10,000 people took to the promenade and ride their bikes underneath the famous Blackpool illuminations. A real spectacle and a privilege to be part of!

In the month I re-made, re-interpreted and installed my Barnaby Festival commission into Sevendale House in Manchester's Northern Quarter. This is still in situe if anyone wants to catch a glimpse before it comes down in March. I also found some time to move studios from the 2nd floor to the 4th floor at Rogue. Phew!

Consumed #2

At the end of September was Rogue Artists' Studios annual Open Studios event, which was a great success this year with more people attending that ever before. I was put in charge with all the marketing for the event as well as taking the job or Social Media officer for the studio group on a continuing basis. I made a new light installation that filled the whole of my space and allowed me to explore my new home. Thank you everyone who came, it was a great weekend. September was a CRAZY month!

Shifting Luminosity at Rogue Open Studios

At the Autumn drew in, so did the opportunity to create more light-works. At the beginning of October I took part in Light Night Leeds, where I created a brand new site-specific installation in Leeds Art Gallery. Thousands upon thousands of visitors came and saw the work, a great event to be part of! In October I also had a piece of writing published in online magazine EDGEcondition vol.3 Art & Architecture, have a read if you haven't already?

Intervals at Leeds Art Gallery

Mid-way through October, I took the opportunity to go on my first artist residency to Kurt Schwitters Merz Barn at the Cylinders Estate in Cumbria. I blogged about my experience every day. It was a tough week as I had, by this point in the year, started to totally pull apart and reassess my practice. The residency acted as a well-timed retreat, where I took time to think, draw plans and read a lot. Thank god I went with friend and fellow-artist Alana Tyson for moral support.

In November I had my work included in Hanover Projects' In The City publication as well as featuring on the cover and inside The University of Texas publication/journal Reunion: The Dallas Review. I am gathering a nice little collection of books that my work has featured in, they all sit there on my shelf, in date order...

The Dallas Review

At the end of November I was asked to write a piece for A-N News about the 30th anniversary of Castlefield Gallery. This really tested my writing skills and was a very useful exercise. More of that please? I also did some filmed with A-N for a new film they are making about their bloggers, all will be revealed soon!

I installed new work at Airspace Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent for their In The Window space, this allowed me to create another site-responsive work, this time using cellulose acetate and florescent bulbs. A wonderful opportunity to see the development of my practice and the working-up of fresh ideas in the flesh.

Assaulting the Asphalt at Airspace Gallery

To finish off the year with a bang, I was approached by I-D Magazine and Vice Magazine in New York who were/are making a series of documentaries about obsessed collectors. Me being the Guinness World Record holder for having the Largest collection of Spice Girls memorabilia was a perfect subject for one of their films. The filming took place in December and was tiring but fun... not as glamorous as you imagine and involved leather trousers (I will say no more). The mini documentary will be shown in the Spring via online channel Noisey TV.

Me with some of my Spice Girls stage costumes on the I-D shoot

So, there it is! My 2014. It was a good one personally and professionally. Thanks to everyone who made it so brilliant. x

Revisting and renewing old works

On one of my previous blog posts I spoke about how I have used materials from old work to make new work. This week I am still playing with the 6 LED Light Sheets sourced from my old work Repeated Everyday.

In the past couple of days I have been layering coloured acetate's on top of the light sheets to make new light drawings (images here). I have been excited about the results and think that the use of transparencies works well within my practice and within my research into luminosity.

Today I decided to use the notion of reusing elements within old works to use within new experiments. I pulled open my plan-chest draw to find 10's of works on paper that I had made last year as part of my Arts Council England Grants for the Arts Research and Development funding which I was awarded.

There were some works that I never showed as they didn't quite work. They didn't work because the colours were too flat or sordid or there wasn't enough white space around the image; basically the image I had created didn't jump off the page, like the successful ones did.

I felt this was a shame, but didn't bin them. I don't keep everything, but I kept these sheets. There was elements within them that I liked, but they weren't 100%. Now I know why...

They totally lacked luminous colour! 

I was attempting to use bright hues, but the colours didn't sing. 

One by one, I laid the works on paper onto my LED light sheets and photographed them. I felt a sense of excitement when a few of them started taking on a new lease of life. The light source offered the colours a voice: they were singing!

The colours were at last, vivid in their hue, saturate and glowing; they has become luminous. Of course not all pieces did this; especially the ones where I had applied colour on top of black or collage. The blackness blocked any saturation the colour could muster altogether.

In some of the more successful ones, shown below, the use of the black separates the colour, as a line in a drawing or a wall within a space. I believe that this is how these works should be shown. I feel they are finished. 

Such a simple change makes all the difference. Lifting them from out of my draws, out of their dullness, and into becoming possibilities. I see all my works on paper as possibilities: potential for how they could be taken into three dimensions and how they might one day occupy space.

Visual Research: Using my iPhone for Documentation

I have been continuing my experiments with coloured theatre gels and the LED light sheets I recovered from an old work earlier last week. I have been mainly just playing in my studio; arranging then rearranging the coloured acetate filters onto the LED light sheets, both as they come as by cutting them into my desired shapes. 

This playful approach very much reminds me of the Construction Project that I set myself earlier in the year; making, documenting and taking apart whatever work I made. I have been using my iphone as a way of documenting my stream of ideas very quickly. I do not want the photographs of the ideas to be polished, as the ideas themselves aren't yet; they are still developing.  

Visual research.

As I try and bring reading back into my practice as a method of learning, I have also tried researching my concerns through doing and making; I find a combination of both suits me well (an obvious thing to say and do, but I'm still learning). 

In the past, I have felt unable to be as playful, thinking that everything I made had to be polished and therefore a finished work. I was wrong. This method of practice has proved unhealthy as I found myself churning out commissions without allowing myself time to develop as an artist.

This set of images shows how I have used the coloured gel filters in three dimensions rather than laying them flat over the light sheets, laminating them or overlaying them on top of each other to create different levels of saturation within the colour scale. 

I have still managed to achieve the increasing saturation through the building of layers, but with these images, I have thought more about how I could create this within three dimensional space. These small acetate experiments are positioned on top of and in front of two of my LED light sheets to make the colour luminescent. 

I envisage these meager tests works to potentially exist within large spaces, maybe in front of opaque windows (natural light turning the colour transparencies luminous) or another light source. I can imagine them scaled up to mammoth proportions, as to impact on a space. Giving the viewer a chance to stand amongst the sculptures, becoming part of the coloured layers. Or allowing a viewer to gaze at the intertwining layers that create stronger colour saturation as the scrolls roll tighter. Another thought: Placing them on a LED light sheet shelf (keeping with the small scale) to allow people to come up, close and personal.

There is so much potential here. So much to play with...

When I was at The Glasgow School of Art, Ross Sinclair gave a lecture about the importance of documenting everything you did. He was right. Whatever I decide to do, at least I have snapped away and got them in my iphone photo library -  my digital sketchbook.