Elizabeth Willow
Material: Mixed Media | Location: Wales
Elizabeth Willow makes intricate things from gathered materials, including paper, words, thread, and found objects both natural and unnatural, creating artist’s books, sculptures and installations. She is inspired by the physical and functional nature of objects and materials, and also by their symbolic qualities - how they act as repositories for meaning and memory, how we touch and are touched by them.
Elizabeth is drawn to immersive, painstaking processes, such as type-setting, bookbinding, collage and embroidery, becoming intimate with materials and with the rituals and gestures of making. The acts of finding, collecting and sorting are important in her work, whether rummaging through boxes and rusty tins in junk-shops, or gathering feathers and thistledown in wild places.
For 'Murmuration' (6 May - 2 Jul 2022), she has created a flock of paper birds fashioned from old magazines, and a collection of nests, each one a delicate vessel woven from roots, stems and other found materials.