“They have a quiet form of dimensionality, not quite two dimensions, not quite three, but a third thing.”

Hi Liz! We are delighted to have you as a 2025 resident! Your work often engages with large-scale installations that aim to evoke both the grandeur of landscapes and monuments, as well as the overwhelming nature of Hyperobjects. Can you tell us more about why you are drawn to working on this scale, and how this approach shapes the way you address the relationship between the vastness of the universe and the complexities of industrial capitalism?

In Photography 101 we learn about the camera viewfinder as a cropping device- I’ve always been drawn to what is beyond the cropped image, visually, and philosophically. So I pan and pan, and I zoom out, and click all the hyperlinks until I start to put together a bigger picture. The zoomed-out view allows us to understand that a singular instance is connected to larger patterns and systems. Everything is interconnected, everything is entangled, everything is intentionally too big to fail. And yet well let it fail. We fail it (the Earth, each other). In much of my image-making, I work with the bird’s eye view, God’s view, or satellite view to learn what is hidden behind a wall or a stand of trees, or to understand the scale and shape of a landform. The zooming out reminds us that we are just a speck on this planet and it places us back in the vastness of the cosmos, rather than at the center of the universe.

Everything is entangled and everything is interconnected. Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel (The History of the World in 7 Cheap Things) use the language of “the ecosystem of capitalism” to refer to these pervasive entanglements. That image seems like an accurate description of relationships, though I find it depressing to overlay capitalism onto functions of the living world (though I suppose that is the truth of it), it is more like a factory.

Capitalism is entangled, but functions best under the conditions of compartmentalization. A classic example is Henry Ford’s assembly line for industrial-scale production, which shifted the manufacture of objects from skilled craftspeople with embodied technical and material knowledge to that of a de-skilled laborer who was trained to only perform a small repetitive role within the overall assembly, literally as a cog in the machine, incapable of seeing the bigger picture of production, let alone informing or being informed by the design process. I value my resourcefulness and my skills of making things by hand, whether it is my clothing, other functional objects, or art. These practices are located outside of the loop of dependent consumerism, and feel spiritually connected to how art and objects have been produced for most of human existence.

Hyperobjects become the mascot for the Planetary Climate Crisis - In the tip of the iceberg metaphor, more of the iceberg is becoming visible, but it is also melting all around us. Hyperobjects reflect the complexity and messiness of the world in a way that we can easily fail to see because we have to compartmentalize and accept and simplify the mess in order to navigate the world at all. It's just too much work to thoughtfully consider -EVERYTHING- We would not be able to function (in the efficient way that capitalism demands of us). Art can be a space outside of our familiar sphere of accepted abstracted systems, and if we want to engage with it, we can practice slowing down, and puzzling new meaning together, and asking questions about how it makes any sense at all- Which is something I want us to apply more to our regular existence.

The grief of watching the forests burn, the oceans acidify, the air become unbreathable, the real-time die-off of species - When we fail to see the Hyperobject (which truly, our brains can only barely handle), we don’t see our interconnection: The pollution and plummeting biodiversity (or human genocide) OVER THERE doesn’t really affect us OVER HERE. OVER HERE we are using ChatGPT and getting rich on Bitcoin and OVER THERE a nuclear reactor is being built to power our spam. Our inability to track all the stuff going on OVER THERE is exactly what the contemporary colonial project of the global economy is all about, and we are passively complicit.

I am so drawn to how you are conveying and manipulating materials to express texture. How do you achieve this?

I appreciate different qualities that images can have and I don’t have a hierarchy for what I consider a “good image” except that it elicits a response in the viewer. From high-resolution to very grainy or pixelated, those image qualities can affect how the image is understood, what association people have with it, and its emotive capacity. When I am designing imagery to be screen printed, the bitmap dots become a texture when examined up close, and a legible image from some distance. Much of my imagery is of disturbed landscapes or other things that are unstable, so this quality of image feels appropriate.

I work with imagery that I capture on my phone, on Holga medium format cameras, and sometimes from satellite imagery or from collaging other found digital bits. Because of the large scale that I tend to work on, the breaking down of an image is almost inevitable. Most of the images that I use become extremely low resolution in the scale that I work on, and I try to push the limits of their legibility by leaning into the materiality of the outputs. I am most often translating imagery to large-scale screen printing or to handweaving on a Jacquard loom, the texture of the yarn or the bitmap dot becomes what is seen as the image.

I love the refusal of the image to be understood when viewed up close- It's the act of backing up to see the big picture that reflects my interest in working on a large scale, I suppose that an externality of working on that scale is that the image is never crisp- the texture is more crispy.

The sculptures, textiles and installations often interrupt the space they inhabit. What process or set of questions do you ask yourself in order to achieve the desired outcome?

I often design a new work for a specific site, later I have to reimagine it for another space. I want to have the installation process feel as creative and interesting for me as the initial making of the work. I am capable of meticulous planning of installation based on the architecture or light or other spatial conditions, but I love the opportunity to improvise. I don’t think of my art as “finished” or “stable” in the traditional sense. Like other objects in the world, they are components that are capable of recombining in any number of ways, and their meaning is dependent on their context.

My approach to installation is to create many objects that can be in relationship in a number of ways, and to arrange any variety of objects differently each time. My goal is to stay receptive to the physical site and the social and political atmosphere of my surroundings to inform each iteration. This queer approach attunes to the unique nature of an exact point in space and time.

How do the concepts of permanence and impermanence manifest in your work?

Themes of permanence and impermanence are most easily conjured with my material choices. I often work between fabric and metal, or more recently, I have been molding HDPE (#2 plastic). When an image is made of fabric, it is inherently flexible, sculptable, malleable and adaptable. Cloth becomes a proxy for the body, whose fragility and temporality is understood by all, and mortality is the root of our deepest fear.

By extension, my work considers landscapes and monuments for our assumption of their permanence- though my use of these images often depicts them as fragile or unstable. I look to the long timescale of Earth’s history and see how rock and minerals and water have transformed over millennia. 5 previous mass-extinctions that are legible in our planet’s geological record, some of which perhaps happened in an instant, as with the theory of a comet, and others likely occurred at the rate that we are now experiencing (and causing).

I suppose making this type of art is partially a tool for me to process my own grief about the degradation, suffering, and loss of life on earth, though it was also a way to cope with personal loss. For more than 50 years, we’ve had the knowledge that the extraction and pollution that fuel capitalism are causing damage to our home, our species and others. We experience this mass-extinction in slow-motion, but the rocks have seen this process before.

As you have shown your work both nationally and internationally, has anything changed or influenced your practice as you’ve explored different sites for your work?

I had the opportunity to work as an illustrator for an archaeological dig in Greece and Turkey for a summer in my early 20’s and that had a big influence on how I think about time and culture and being unable to determine what is remembered about you. The site where I worked was basically excavating an ancient town dump for shards of early mold-made ceramics. I was already interested in trash because I come from a family of trash-pickers, but this experience put me inside the field of archaeology, and has informed my understanding of trash from more of an anthropological lens.

I often go camping and love being in places that feel a little wild. I’m captivated by, and want to deconstruct, the American creation myth (manifest destiny) that is linked to imagery of western landscapes. The qualities of wild natural landscapes and phenomena that have been written and theorized about as Sublime have a dark twin in industrial and landscapes and phenomena (related to how Timothy Morton describes Hyperobjects).

Responding to a place or a site is part of my practice though, a commonality among public spaces in America that most captives me is the ubiquity of mass-produced disposable objects. This type of trash is local to everywhere. I have sometimes integrated it into my sculptures, draped in sheer fabric, so that it is still visible. One piece, Convexity Concavity, became a large installation that was improvised from cardboard and pallets that were onsite. Thanks to global capitalism, I can rely on finding these materials of global trade everywhere, and when I have the time to improvise for an installation, I love to use these materials to create a sculptural form that my fabrics drape over.

I love the challenge of traveling with art. I’ve made several suites of really large cast metal work, I am really proud of that work technically, and the content of it. But after I did the Kohler Arts/Industry residency, I forced myself on a sculpture diet. I work across media, but textiles have always been a home base- the logics of their construction, all of the different material qualities they can have, the endless metaphors and meaningful associations with function, history and culture, and sometimes most importantly, their portability. One of my favorite design challenges is to fit a 2000 square foot solo exhibition into 2 luggages that I can take on a plane, train or bus.

October 2025 AIR: LIz ensz

Vist our New Space!

October 2025 AIR: LIz ensz

September 2025 AIR: Lucy wood baird

Vist our New Space!