Liz Bailey is a collector. The gathering of visual information creates a store of material for her artistic work and is the work itself in it's painted representation. Here a subjective world is constructed consisting of individual parts that only acquire meaning through the context they are put in.
The ten part series of paintings The City irritates above all by its title, but therein lies the key: understanding the paintings of bouquets of flowers wrapped in cellophane as something other than an up-dating of the still-life genre or a variation of photorealistic painting. Here, a place, The City, is described using pictures of objects.The artist shows neither houses, streets nor people in order to construct her picture of the city, but nevertheless in this series she makes her city into a place full of possible identities and relations and also into a space, inasmuch as actions are associated with it (after Michel de Certeau, French philosopher and sociologist, 1925-1986). Human action, even sympathy, is present through the possible occasion of buying a bunch of flowers. Here the artist becomes an anthropologist and explains the potential behaviour of city-dwellers in exceptional emotional circumstances, from being in love to mourning. The image of this city is thus boght to life.
© Lioba Reddeker
Catalogue: HangArt-7 'The Secret of England's Greatness'
published 2010 by: basis wein - Kunst, Information und Archiv, www.basis-wein.at