b. 1984, Manchester, UK. Based, Texas USA.
Elizabeth Waggett’s practice interrogates the cultural and emotional weight of beauty and how it is shaped by pressure, memory, and endurance.
She integrates precious metals, light, found textiles, and oil-painted figuration into layered compositions that reflect on how value is formed through fragility, survival, and transformation. Her work demonstrates that beauty is shaped by pressure and survival instead of perfection. In Waggett’s ‘Light Paintings,’ light is treated as an unpredictable force distorting surface, altering perception, and challenging permanence. Drawing from classical European still life and textile traditions, Waggett reframes motifs historically coded as feminine, rendering them not delicate, but resilient. Her work merges refinement with rupture, offering a visual language for strength marked by softness and scars alike.
Waggett’s education in fashion and postgraduate in design from The University of Manchester inform her material innovation. She bends the rules of her mediums, layering gold and silver leaf into surfaces that require an alchemic blend of process, physical force and precision. Often, she uses animals and botanical forms as allegories for the female experience, distilling complex emotional narratives into pared-back, essential compositions that evoke calm, clarity, and quiet strength.
She has exhibited at galleries in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Abu Dhabi, Basel, Miami, Hong Kong, Zurich, and Brussels. Alongside collaborations with luxury brands such as Saks, Soho House, Fleur Du Mal, and Netflix, she has sustained ongoing partnerships with the UN’s Lionshare Fund and the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy. Waggett was notably commissioned by HRH King Charles, in collaboration with the Prince’s Trust, for its 50th anniversary.
After six years living and working in New York City, she is currently maintaining a full-time studio practice between Texas and France. In 2025, she will attend the Royal College of Art in London to deepen her ongoing inquiry into home, displacement, and the construction of value.