Elizabeth Colbert - 'Threading Through'

Wednesday 6 - Saturday 23 January 2021

Click here for artwork by Elizabeth Colbert

The needle is used to repair damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness.
It is never aggressive, it’s not a pin—Louise Bourgeois

We live on the brink of the extinction of the species; it is imminent, yet like W.B. Butler Yeats’ rough beast, it is quiescent. It exceeds our ability to imagine it and if it were already upon us, we would have no idea how to put this reality into words. But there are other means of expression, ones that are as porous, precarious and subject to rents as language. Ones that can be re-sewn, patched up and covered in signs intimating what is to come.

Elizabeth Colbert’s art practice burgeoned following a long career in writing. It now ranges over and through many mediums—drawing, ceramics, painting, printmaking, weaving and sewing, each drawn upon to articulate an idea or concern from the complex fabric of feeling. Her art draws from many sources—aesthetic, poetic, autobiographical and philosophical. Though one of the primary themes of Colbert’s work is the fragility of things, it does resist pinning down.

(Opening paragraphs of exhibition catalogue essay written by Dominique Hecq)