Elizabeth Haigh is an Australian artist who works across the mediums of painting, printmaking, textiles and photography in order to create narratives that highlight environmental signatures influenced by our contemporary existence. Her practice embodies love and respect for the land and she uses those emotions to explore and express traces of time and memory.

In coherence with her passion for locally sourced and found materials, Elizabeth came to ´ace after completing a trip to the Argentinian Puna, where she and Karen Landt-Isley, her artistic partner and colleague, took images that would later be used in the Workshop for their creative process. Navigating technical, aesthetic and conceptual concerns, Elizabeth manifests her feelings about an increasing vulnerable environment through a variety of unorthodox, freestyle experimental processes often combining painting, printmaking, photography and stitching. Attentive to the emerging concerns of the Anthropocene, she imbues her work with the ethos of sustainability.

Elizabeth came to ´ace to do a Production Residency in our Workshop. In her own words: “My practice pays homage to the living earth, the delicate rhythms, and its vulnerability. A love and respect for the land and our changing relationship to the environment is the focus of my artwork. During the residency, I added to my artmaking skills by learning carborundum and aquatint print processes, further ways to create monotypes and experimented with natural earth pigments. I also developed work using current artwork practices of combining paper, fabric and stitch to produce textural works.  I gained the experience of presenting artwork as an installation.”

Through carborundum and aquatint print processes, Elizabeth captured the tonal qualities of rock formations and volcanic horizons from their journey, experimenting with different papers with a preference for transparent Japanese papers due to their delicate and lightweight nature. The artist achieved the conversion of watercolor sketches into monotypes by directly applying colors to the plate, effectively reflecting the diverse color palette of La Puna by layering multi-colored imagery on paper and fabric, which allowed her to intensify colors in specific areas—additionally, the use of embossing, tearing, layering, and stitching techniques together with the exploration of natural earth pigments through screen printing and painting, added textures to her works. The installation was completed with an elongated format and the inclusion of soft sculptures resembling unique cloud formations, all stitched with silver thread to provide a multi-sensory experience.