Lizzie Hughes
Lizzie Hughes is a sculptor whose work includes sound, video and installation. Her recent sculptures made from precious metals, wood and cellophane stem from a residency in a historic gold mining town in New South Wales, Australia. The work includes a pure gold net held aloft by silver forks; fragile frameworks supporting nothing more than voids and structures that could suggest archaic tools or vernacular fencing. The treacherous holes left behind in the heavily mined Australian (and Welsh) landscapes, that feed into this work, provide charged voids hinting at the riches that were once abundant and the spoils left behind.
Previous work has seen her collecting and then structuring large quantities of data allowing her to remotely explore distant landscapes and briefly enter the private worlds of others. To this end, she has made an audio portrait of The Empire State Building by telephoning and speaking to office workers on each of its eighty floors; an electronic map that shows the graphic outlines of over thirty nine thousand swimming pools located in the city of Las Vegas and 4,007 Horizons a video work that transforms generic seaside snapshots into a dazzling journey around the globe.
The Weather in Paris in 1909, is a collection of picture postcards all sent from Paris in the year 1909. The cards are unified by their handwritten messages referring to the state of the weather at the time of writing. The consistent notes about sunshine, wind, rain and snow are interspersed with fragments of other people’s lives from which we can infer a plethora of private narratives.
