b. 1984, Manchester, UK
Elizabeth Waggett is a visual artist based between the USA and Europe. Her practice investigates the fragility and resilience of beauty, memory, and materiality through skilled, labor-intensive works that combine oil paint, precious metals, antique textiles, and light. Drawing on the visual language of European still life, her work places subjects under conditions of restraint, where sustained attention becomes central to how meaning unfolds.
Waggett’s Light Paintings, layered compositions in gold, silver, and zinc alloys, examine thresholds between care and collapse, surface and instability. Botanical forms, ornament, and fragments appear without narrative context, allowing material, light, and time to shape the experience of the work. Her materials hold embedded histories: antique lace, oxidized metals, and found textiles carry traces of use, labor, and place, particularly the industrial textile heritage of her native Manchester. These elements register memory through making, revealing the unseen effort behind what is often perceived as beauty or refinement.
Across her practice, Waggett’s work reflects a distinctly feminine strength, grounded in persistence rather than perfection. Still life, figuration, and abstraction operate as parallel modes, each emphasizing restraint, containment, and material discipline. Works frequently extend beyond the single object, unfolding across grouped paintings and architectural installations that activate space through scale, proximity, and light, holding presence without resolution.
Waggett studied Fashion and Design at the University of Manchester and later Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art. She has exhibited internationally in cities including New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles, and has collaborated with institutions and organizations including The King’s Trust, the UN’s Lion’s Share Fund, Saks, Soho House, Fleur du Mal, and Netflix. Her work is held in private and public collections worldwide, and she is currently developing new immersive installations that extend her exploration of surface, light, and containment into architectural and sensorial space.