Elizabeth's Work
After her degree course in Edinburgh, Elizabeth returned home to Anglesey to establish her jewellery studio. From here she produces sculptural constructions and ranges of more commercially accessible resin and silver jewellery.
This place where she was brought up, and notions of history and home, are central to her work. She explores architectural features and objects near her home, and the forces of the elements upon them.
Anglesey is rich in industrial archaeology, and this features strongly in her work, along side such images are the dovecote at Penmon Priory, Penmon Lighthouse, windows in ancient buildings and fishing vessels slumped over in the mud at low tide on Llys Dulas Estuary.
Her works are based on the concept of framing, and she selects elements of the environment by taking photographs or making paintings and pencil drawings. She uses little colour: monotone signifies pure image; black and white for her emphasises the notion of time passing; light and dark creating mood and depth. She uses fragments of drawings on tracing paper, overlaid to give depth to her images.
Elizabeth also makes tiny artefacts in materials translucent and transparent; metals, wood, resin, linseed oil, tracing paper and plaster. She encapsulates objects and drawings within many layers of resin, sometimes sanding the surfaces to opacity.
These gathered fragments are brought together in her larger pieces, which can be simple trays in open-textured balsa wood supporting her loosely constructed and seemingly spontaneous collections of related images and objects.
This kind of sampling and display of specimens seems almost scientific, like the growth of cultures in the petri dish for further examination. The open box arrangements imply an ever -changing collection of significant items, always suggesting that there is room for more. Elizabeth repeatedly turns for inspiration to the writing of the late R S Thomas and other Welsh poets. She even incorporating fragments of their text into her pieces, but she also includes text and numbers from boat names and registration numbers, and the poetry provided daily by the shipping and weather forecasts.
The above by Sara Roberts is an extract from the ‘Farmers’ Daughters’ exhibition catalogue, Ruthin Craft Centre.