Chlorophilia : Artists : Liz Harrison

On holiday in France nearing the end of summer, we walked in the searing sun, with the insistent and overbearing sound of the cicada in the background. We advanced along the edges of fields of decaying sunflowers, whose time nearing completion, had almost run their cycle. Tall repetitive forms echoing one another, in unison, loosing their golden presence, the green pigment disappearing from their leaves turning them crispy and brown. Rustling as their forms brushed against each other regretting the shortening days as the sunlight was stolen from their substance. This flower worships the sun, whose rays are like a magnet to the sunflowers foliage and their upturned heads. They reminded me of an army, stiff and tall, echoing one another's movements, their heads bobbing up and down with the weight of their seeds. Their time had come.

Liz Harrison's practice is interdisciplinary and focuses on sculptural and lens based installation. Themes of landscape, architecture and text are recurrent, evolving from experiences of spaces that embrace a history, both personal and generic. A spatial awareness and a sense of place are the means of interrogation in Liz Harrison's work - how we understand and occupy not only our present, lived-in spaces but those of our past in collective and in personal memory.

Our immediate surroundings act as her primary resource - spaces defined in the city by architecture, by history and carved by urgent and ever-changing need; rural landscapes whose nature is no less a human construct though it may be played out at a different speed. The sculptural object, site-specific installation, lens-based projection and moving image are often employed simultaneously, in response to diverging and seemingly unrelated subject matter.

Liz Harrison has shown extensively in London, the UK and Europe.

www.lizharrison.co.uk