LIZ CROSSFIELD

Liz Crossfield's practice is semi-autobiographical and has museological references, focussing on performativity, spatiality and celebrates the feminine. Her work explores the beguiling, mystical and enchanted realms within mythologies, folklores, and fairy-tales, centred around womanhood. Her studio practice is instinctive, intuitive and connects with the felt sense, inner voice, and the wild underworld. Formerly working as a fashion stylist, editor and correspondent for international magazines and television. This stylised career, playing dress-up with fashion models, make-up artists and fashion photographers, often spills into the work via colour, texture, cut pages of fashion magazines and styling details. The perception and depiction of the female through both history and art history contextualises the subject, in particular the relationship between femininity and feminism, Victorian fairy paintings and the female Surrealists. A passion for blousy, blossoming flowers, dreamy childhood reveries and both the mother and the self as archetypes can be seen within the work. Crossfield considers the making of the work alchemy, an orchestration and a performance whereby the studio becomes the stage. Besides a love and engagement with the felt sense while painting, the activity of often deconstructing and reconstructing paintings into collage are concepts that activate the material in conscious acts of performativity and spatiality. The work communicates a breadth of aims, including the joy and fear of life, the lightness of being and the weight of the world. This engagement and dialogue between the subject and the material is fundamental to her practice. Crossfield graduated with an MA from City & Guilds Art School in 2022.