Elize de Beer is a South African artist
currently based in Cork and working from her studio at Sample Studios.
She graduated from the Michaelis School of
Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town, South Africa with a BAFA and Honours
in Curatorial Studies. With printmaking and book arts being her main mediums,
she belongs to the printmaking collective “The Printing Girls” and is a member
of Cork Printmakers.
She had been part of numerous exhibitions and
has artworks in both private and institutional collections. De Beer is working
towards her first solo exhibition at the LHQ Gallery, Cork IE.
Artist Statement
Elize de Beer is an
artist based in Ireland, currently working from her studio in Sample Studios,
Cork. Since the start of her artistic practice and during the development of
her visual language, de Beer has strongly been influenced by her dyslexia,
whereby written language is read as images and layered shapes. In her artwork
she has explored her dyslexic experience of “reading” to better understand the
disorder and for audiences to get a glimpse into her nuanced way of seeing the
world.
As her practice
developed, her dyslexia began to inform her methodology for creating abstract
artworks. Through the use of printmaking, ink drawings, collages, and artist
books de Beer has intuitively experimented with the use of letters as images,
layers of tones, textures, and fields of colour. All with the intention of
creating artworks that visually play with the readability of language, along
with the intuitive joy and freedom to which abstraction lends itself.
It is through trying to
understand her relationship with written language that the objectivity of books
and their history became a focal point in her practice. With her background as
a bookbinder and printmaker, de Beer creates non-narrative artist books that
merge her fascination with bookbinding traditions, printmaking, and written
language.
In her current body of work de Beer is exploring the aesthetics and concepts around libraries and archives. Conceptually examining her desire to continuously consume knowledge as a form of self-protection to alleviate anxieties. In her work, she is particularly examining her own library collection acting as a pseudo-librarian. Through this body of work nature, she is always trying to bridge the gap between visual art and the craft of bookbinding. One method is using bookbinding waste material in the art-making process. These waste elements are then translated through the mediums of artist books, pop-up books, and printmaking; mainly etchings, collagraph, and letterpress. Within her art-making process, she aims to use these materials and other visual signifiers of bookmaking to investigate the physicality of a book and the knowledge they hold.
