Eliza Owen | Flic en Flac, Free and Flat Ground

Hand Mixed, Coloured Intaglio Ink On Hokosawa Paper, 37 Plates Of Aluminium And Copper Found In Skips, Scored, Configured Into An Arrangement And Compressed.
Edition of
Dimensions (WxH): 170 x 190cm

Eliza Owen works with print, paint, light, film, collected ephemera and glass, developing a practice in which printmaking becomes an expanded, sculptural field. Her ideas often begin through walking: noticing rain held on a painted road line, a traffic light reflected in a puddle, or the shifting surfaces of the built world. These fleeting observations are folded back into material processes, where colour, light and edge are continually altered by pressure, movement and scale. Recently, Owen has been making large drypoints on Japanese paper from found copper and folded metal plates. Hammered, scribed and marked with carborundum, the plates become fields that are both image and object, like craggy landscapes bent, compressed and choreographed by the movement of the whole body. Her prints contain drawing and painting, but also carry the memory of installation: they move between flatness and three-dimensionality, compression and expansion, the fluid and the contained. She is interested in fragile, provisional and overlooked things, and in how, according to their conditions of looseness and contingency, they might form constellations of meaning. In 2022, her prints were acquired by the Ashmolean Museum for their contemporary collection, and by the Paul Ruddock Foundation on behalf of Mansfield College, Oxford.