This website contains examples of works made by Liz Harrison over the span of her career as an artist, and operates a bit like a sketchbook, images combined together to give a feeling of the work and to enable one to move through the site easily. If more information is required, selected videos/films/installations/paintings etc can be expanded on, with excerpts, text and further images.
About her work: statement
‘My practice spans a broad range of media, incorporating the sculptural object, site-specific installation, lens based projection and moving image.
Concerns within my work are to do with sense of place and an awareness and questioning of how we realise and occupy space both in the present day real time and in our spatial, and associative memories of the past, collective and personal. The issue of space connects directly to architecture both urban and rural, how we inhabit it, sense it, feel it. I use my immediate surroundings as a direct resource in terms of imagery that relates to methodologies and concepts encapsulated within my practice. A variety of eclectic media, images and processes are employed simultaneously, in response to diverging and seemingly unrelated subject matter. What pulls the work together are the underlying concepts, the tentative relationships that individuals have with their surroundings, the everyday repetitious, mundane habitual activities that inform our perceptions.
In general my work is driven by a socio/political/aesthetic akin to my experiences, playing with the possibilities of spaces and buildings as objects, material, physical matter, and, through words, concepts, philosophies. Themes of landscape, architecture, text, are re-current and evolve from the experiences of spaces that embrace a history, both personal and generic. It is positioned in the present but it is interpreted through an acknowledgement of the past. Concepts and ideas are analysed through a variety of research procedures including archiving, in such institutions as Kew archives, the British Library etc. This has enabled the re-interpretation of historical events, through narrative writing. The use of text has been an increasing methodology for communicating these ideas.
Much of my work through the use of video/film explores the temporality and duality of time, providing a focal point and symbol for a disappearing and engulfed time space. Filming sites as disparate as the demolition of an inner city block of flats to an abandoned partially submerged houseboat in a backwater creek to a walk along a coastal cliff top all possess this common feeling of temporality and express the site’s history with a disturbing sense of threat and foreboding.’
