I AM WOMAN, HEAR ME ROAR
Los Angeles, 2023
‘I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar,’ presented by Art Angels, an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Elizabeth Waggett.
The exhibition speaks to the renewed power of figurative painting in the 21st century and is marked by a uniquely peaceful quality. This work continues Waggett’s investigation into painting’s ability to depict the invisible. Referencing artists from Delacroix to Longo to Gericault, Waggett slams together the intimate and the epic. Here, her paintings find a space of intersectionality, somewhere between feminism and environmentalism, mortality, and the mythologies from which societies are constructed.
These works invite one into a state of rueful contemplation, to make sense of the world around them and the part we all play as inexplicable complexities. In I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar, Waggett turns her attention to the voice in her own life. This deeply intimate examination of the powerful force of femininity, authenticity, and fearlessness.
Waggett uses animals as the subject of her work as a uniquely powerful index of parity, wherein animal and the feminine exist in similar conditions of concurrent life. While the human figure is missing from her works the suggestion of its presence is always there. The psychologically charged Big Cats carry a certain tenacity and force; feared and admired in equal measure for their predatory skill, power, and stately beauty. Illuminating the notion that any creature, irrespective of size or stature, will fight to get what they need out of life in order to survive as it is the nature of all living things.
Studies of these smaller creatures are augmented by scale to overwhelm and jar the viewer. Formally, the level of craft these drawings possess examines the importance of their participation in our environment as beings which exist on purpose and live with purpose. Waggetts’ practice has long been concerned with vulnerability and fragility, and her studies capture the way these themes manifest in the smallest of moments and beings. Gilding these works then elevates the subject into a realm of holiness, underscoring the idea that reverence for our environment in turn elicits reverence for humanity.
The artist’s distinctive style is informed by her background in gilding; large, almost impossible paintings are made sculptural in experience. Waggett's figurative paintings and drawings are unmistakably rooted in real space and time, but abstracted by bold gestures of gold, often applied using traditional Victorian patterns, nodding to the Mancunian roots of the artist. It is through the materiality of gold that Waggett achieves a simultaneous de/re construction of form, obscuring that which seems immediately discernible.
In the panoramic, eponymous I am Woman, hear me roar, a layered gold patterned canvas bursts from a near-voided backdrop, proliferating across three panels and evincing the objective beauty of the motif. But the gold is distressed or being distressed— magnifying the noise in which women and animals need to make to be truly heard. The paintings evoke a secure and introspective narrative of what is constant in our lives around the ever changing landscape. Unmoved from the illusion of stability, the only constant is yourself.
“My current body of work is about where I currently stand in my journey and provides a glimpse as to where I intend on going. My solo exhibition, I am Woman, hear me roar, presents the boundaries I have pushed using the caliber of craft I possess and by stripping back and manipulating the work and materials in ways I haven’t previously attempted; increasing scale, blending textures and materials and destroying clean lines.
These works would not have been made possible had I not journeyed back to the UK to work with craftsmen, using the materials that have been embedded in the fabric of my home country for centuries. With the finished pieces in mind, I knew I would be testing the limits of these materials; pushing their boundaries to the very edge, developing my own unique methods of utilizing these precious, sumptuous, metals. The mystery that lies within each piece is captivating not only visually, but physically too - they beg for the viewer to reach out and touch them like a moth moving towards the light. ”
