GROUNDWORK
A Studio Presentation by Elizabeth Waggett
September 2026

Groundwork brings together a new body of work focused on structural tension, raw materiality, and the physical mechanics of craft. Released directly by the artist ahead of an upcoming research period, this collection serves as a direct, unmediated record of labor.

“Elizabeth Waggett pulls gold into her canvases neither as decorative flourish nor symbol of luxury but as a material with memory. It carries the weight of devotion, labour, trade, ornament, and a cultural desire. It speaks equally to sacred painting and domestic interiors, to illuminated manuscripts and inherited jewellery, to the economic systems that assign value and the deeply personal objects we keep because they feel charged with meaning.

And it is the way Waggett refuses to let it settle into a single role, that I find most seductive about her practice. Across her canvases, we see it at once luminous and restrained, precious and vulnerable. It catches light, but it also absorbs all that history named above. It sits on the surface of her works as both image and object, reminding us that painting is not simply something we look through, but something we confront physically.

And in fact, that physicality sits at the heart of Waggett’s whole project. She wrestles with paint, almost literally. What first appears as painting gradually reveals itself to be something more complex and materially unruly. Oil paint collides with lace, gold leaf, and traces of labour that resist easy categorisation. Are we looking at a still life, a relief, an object, or a fragment of architecture? The answer is, of course, all of the above.”

— Carrie Scott, Curator

"This work is driven entirely by the mechanics of my craft. Groundwork is a physical record of time spent testing the weight and tolerance of my materials. I approach this work as a builder, leaning into the physical limits of the elements I use. The resulting objects are unmediated and raw, meant to stand as an honest accounting of the time, discipline, and physical resistance required to make them."

—Elizabeth Waggett , 2026