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 highly skilled, labor-intensive works that combine oil paint, precious metals, antique textiles, and light. Often rooted in the visual language of European still life, her work disrupts inherited aesthetic codes to explore the emotional weight of displacement, survival, and transformation.
Waggett’s “Light Paintings”, layered compositions in gold, silver, and zinc alloys, examine the thresholds between care and collapse, surface and rupture. Whether referencing museum-framed botanical forms, Victorian ornament, or the aftershocks of personal and collective trauma, her work unravels what is preserved and what resists preservation. Her materials hold their own stories: antique lace, oxidized metals, and found textiles carry traces of time, place, and working-class labor, particularly the industrial histories of her native Manchester. These elements become quiet monuments to memory, revealing the unseen efforts behind what we deem beautiful or refined. Though grounded in domestic and decorative materials, the work resists containment, expanding into architectural space through scale, structure, and the manipulation of light.
Drawing on experiences of migration, disability, and motherhood, Waggett’s work embraces a distinctly feminine strength, one not defined by perfection or permanence, but by the grace of persistence. She engages with philosophical questions around the sacred, the ornamental, and the politics of preservation, asking what beauty costs, and who it serves.
Waggett studied Fashion and Design at the University of Manchester and later Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art. She has exhibited in major cities including New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles, and collaborated with institutions such as HRH King Charles’ King’s Trust,and the UN’s Lionshare Fund. Alongside collaborations with 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 themes into architectural and sensorial space.