Featured Artist Elizabeth Sher

Artist Elizabeth Sher uses symbols and language to encourage reflection and personal interpretation. Visit her website to see more.

 

 

Material becomes metaphor. Rope holds tension, connection, confinement, and resilience. Language becomes both image and assertion. Spirals suggest expansion, continuity, and time. Across decades of practice, my work has explored feminism, ecology, healthy aging, and the persistence of voice. Humor and accessibility often surface, particularly in my film and video work, even when the underlying themes are urgent.

 

 

I am interested in endurance of materials, of bodies, of ideas and in the ways transformation itself becomes a form of resilience.

 

 

I work in series. Each body of work begins with an image, material, or idea that insists on being pursued: rope, language, spirals, a damp stone wall. I return to it repeatedly, allowing it to unfold through variation and transformation until its emotional and metaphorical range fully emerges.

 

 

In my series, Mark My Words, I used words as image to convey some of my anxiety about the state of the world. My new series, Spiraling Out of Control, features spirals that move from rope to wire to painted and drawn marks. In the latest works I am adding words and phrases onto the spirals. These forms reflect the instability many of us are feeling but also hold something steady beneath it all. A rhythm. A return. A quiet sense of renewal.

 

 

Since 2008, many of these investigations have begun during artist residencies outside the United States. There I create small, exploratory works that later evolve in my Oakland studio into larger pieces across multiple forms: paintings, photographs, artist books, and moving image works. When exhibited, these projects often include both the intimate works created on site and the more expansive works that grew from them.

 

 

My practice moves fluidly between photography, painting, digital processes, and film. I am drawn to both traditional and emerging technologies, not for novelty but for their ability to deepen material presence. I often begin with something tactile and specific, a rope’s twist, the weight of a word, the grain of a photographic negative, and through repetition, enlargement, fragmentation, and abstraction.

 

 

I push it toward something more atmospheric and immersive yet accessible so viewers can bring their own experience and meaning to the work.

 

Elizabeth Sher invites you to follow on Facebook and Instagram.