Lizzie Munro
‘Lizzie presents us with work intrinsically linked with the natural world. Investigating wilderness within the city, Lizzie uses locally foraged willow and vine to create objects which aid the crossing of thresholds. Collected from miniature ecosystems nestled off motorways and tennis courts, the materials Lizzie uses come from grey areas in terms of ownership. These in-between spaces are politically charged no man’s lands which they seek to reclaim. Woven masks and burial chambers consider ritual, mortality and deep time, with a focus on the rhythmic embodiment of traditional methods of making.’
The Skinny, June 2023
will the circle be unbroken?
this instillation exists in echo.
they are the echoes that move us out of bed each morning,
the revelations we agree to, to make sense of what’s going on here.
and by here, i mean, now- you- reading this, and all that you carry
why do you get up each day?
what moves you?
It’s the why’s, the what’s, the who’s, the when’s,
these are how we determine to live.
and for me, this installation was born from my own revelations:
my reflections of death.
‘death is a mirror’ says john o’donohue, irish poet,
and what has it told me?
about what remains,
golden and singed from loss:
love
its binding colliding force
the gravitational pull of each thing to another
to share, to love, to give
and this instillation exists in testament to this
to these reflections, to these revelations.
drawing questions?
I began drawing at a young age and would spend my evenings of adolescence doodling fictional worlds; abstracting the ‘objective’ world I see. The practice of drawing to me, from a young age, was always about trying to depict something ‘beneath the surface’ as Bill Viola, video artist, once said.
There lives inside us so many answers to so many questions we cannot yet formulate. And it’s the world of feeling that lives dark inside us that brings about these questions, these answers, through our bodies. And so, I guess that’s part of what these images are; this transference. the way the body, aided with tools, can depict something that is so deep inside us, the act of drawing being this crossing between these thresholds.
they harken at dawn
‘they harken at dawn’
is a dialogue between two hand woven masks from the clematis vitalba (colloquially known as Old Man’s Beard, or travellers joy) vine. They sit atop dead fir and pine trees, cloaked and wrapped with the invasive clematis vitalba vine. The totems are then nestled into hollowed oak platforms.
to mimic and represent this process of growth- of me, of the plant- is to become part of something that Herman Hesse describes in his book, ‘Ağaçlar’:))
(on trees): ‘In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.’
you bloom! (and i’ll discover how)
you bloom! (and i’ll discover how) is a sculpture comprised of cut, bent, hammered and welded steel.
the sculpture arrives from an interest in ‘scared geometry’- specifically the ‘flower of life’ form. Sacred Geometry believes that all life is part of a divine geometric plan of overlapping and universal patterns and frequencies.
