ELIZABETH LOVEDAY

Lives and Works: Penzance, United Kingdom

“My name is Elizabeth Loveday, I am an artist, mother and story teller from Cornwall. I come from a family of creative craftswomen who have all used alternative materials in the arts to create narrative works. My mother is a wooden automata maker and my grandmother was a ceramists. They both used there work to tell stories and escape the humdrum with humour and a touch or the absurd, in this our work feels linked.

My methods do not sit solely within the traditional notion of “fine art”, but draw elements from illustration, textiles and craft. Using my linear drawings as a guide I use fabric of different weights, textures and age, hand dying, layering and hand stitching to create narrative and decorative works. I use both traditional and gestural embroidery, using threads as accents, highlights and shadows, defining and mark-making sections of my images. I then purposefully bruise, unstitch and weather my work, teasing the weaves to blend the contrast between fabrics. I like to use fabrics of contextual significance; fabric is a powerful and very human medium, it can evoke memory and feeling with ease as we spend our lives draped in it, sleeping in it, peacocking in it and so on, and this can strengthen and give great weight to a narrative.

Several years ago, I began painting alongside my textile work. This has become a second medium for me, for which I have gained shows at several galleries. I have also created a line of silk scarves based on my paintings which are sold through the Elizabeth Loveday website.

I view my work as a visual outlet for dialogues that exist within myself and wider society. Handling humanistic themes, such as parenthood, loss and connection, I use characters loosely gleaned from Cornish folk tellings and my own life to tell stories that exist within the community I live in right now. It is at once comment on self and place and the intermingling of both...

I have been selling work privately for the last ten years but have also been able to do many solo and group shows. I spent a year at Goldsmiths College, London studying Fine Art and then three years studying Illustration at UWE, Bristol. I graduated with a first class BA Hons in 2013. I am now working in a studio at Trewidden gardens close to Penzance, Cornwall.”