Elizabeth Lloyd’s interest into ‘human architecture’ has led to her recent interest in ‘outer space’ and the universal history of space exploration. Making reference to NASA's female astronaut, Christina Koch and her historic 328 days in space, the longest single space flight by a woman aboard the International Space Station in space history. As well as the China space programme, landing on the dark side of the moon and the Mars mission TW 1 rocket launch this year in July 2020.
The artwork explores the idea of building/constructing human spaces for occupation. Image and colour are constructed using flattened picture planes, a formalist theory in Western Fine Art Painting and a reflection of the flat perspective depicted in Chinese Art History. It is an idealist and surrealist approach, enabling the viewer to depict more than can be seen by the naked eye. The composition adopts a sequence of flat 2D perspective planes. The images draw on mythology, science fiction and the human condition, often rendered with neon colour and digital filters. The artwork draws on the spiritual, and the human desire to explore the Universe and the sentiments that seem to underpin every human story. The images explore the concept of looking into, through, and around the human awareness of architectural and domestic spaces. The images fuse East and West – expressing otherworldly wonder, and the excitement of exploration of the planets within the known solar system, and the further mysteries of the Universe.
There is a narrative poetry within Elizabeth's work and a human story behind every image. Her early research into the history of colour theory, and artists influenced by colour, led to the making of her early large abstract colour planes. These artworks were in turn, influenced by Abstract art, Op art Pop art, but also new discoveries in science.
Her visual enquiries into the use of pure colour have developed into a mechanised colour aesthetic. This is further stimulated by the knowledge behind how we actually see and perceive colour. This profound interest into mechanical means of representation is an ongoing obsession in her work. The Photo-silkscreen process, and the photomechanical filters of digital technology are the pivotal parallels. They reveal a fusion between human and machine worlds, provoking a feeling of the ‘world at large’.
Elizabeth’s work shifts between abstraction and representation – her desire to explore Art historical references has led her to appropriate moral allegories more often seen in historic Western paintings. A change from abstraction to pictorial representation was inspired by real life events. Moral observations of living create human parallels. Her desire to re-visit the past and rearrange the pieces of time and space into a new romantic notion of wonder and magic, identify a new and rewarding stimulus.
Her more recent enquiries into human exploration of ‘outer space’ has extended a notion of the enigmatic, and presents another opportunity for a conceptual order of logical time and space, making a new imprint in the here and now.
“Reimagining the fusion of past and present enables a reflection and reinvention of ‘worlds.’ The unfathomable becoming a more realisable illusion. These poetic visions reveal a myriad of information - a transmission – a message of time and existence.”
Elizabeth practices at Spike Print Studios in Bristol and she is currently studying a PhD in Fine Art at the University of Aberystwyth, Wales.
She is an Elected Associate Fellow of the Royal Society of Engravers - Painter Printmakers, Bankside Gallery, London.
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Website: http://www.libbylloydartist.com
Contact: libbylloyd@icloud.com