Liz Ballard
Norwich-based artist Liz Ballard often creates site-specific, interactive artworks, with an emphasis on drawing. Starting points are typically a single process or common form, with working methods that view the activity of drawing as a performative trace. By manipulating forms and formats to produce multiple variations of themselves, she attempts to explore notions of the temporal and infinite. Spatially this results in sculptures that explore sequential volumetric relationships, but the same concerns more consistently stimulate time-based outcomes, with drawings produced by the slow thawing of frozen pigment.
Ballard practise utilizes humble or found materials and resources, such as ice and water, cardboard and printed maps, and also includes live readings and performance. Her approach to making artwork is perhaps best exemplified by ‘15 artists, 15 days‘ (2009), where she developed an evolving ‘still life’ by using frozen watercolour pigment cast in discarded plastic containers.Liz Ballard graduated in Fine Art in 2001 from University of West of England, Bristol, before spending two years working in France. Recent exhibitions include ‘Jeune Creation‘ at Le Grande Halle de la Villette, Paris, 15 artists, 15 days at first site, Colchester, and participated in the ‘Escalator Retreat The Economics of the Art Systemat’ Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge. She is a former Steering Committee Chair of OUTPOST, an artist run space in Norwich, and is founding manager of the Late Shift, a monthly arts event at Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, UEA Norwich.