British artist Liz West creates mesmerizing installations, using light and color. Her vivid environments mix luminous color and radiant light in order to provoke a heightened sensory awareness in the viewer.
“My most vivid memories of childhood are based on light and color, not necessarily together but sometimes,” she explained in an interview with Nulty+. “These experiences would be in a car, my dad driving through Barnsley town center, which at the time was lit with incandescent and neon lights. The light was much warmer then, an enticing glow.”
“I was always very perceptive, even as a child, and I would pay attention to the reflections on the floor, particularly on the wet floor so common in the north of England,” she added. “I found it really alluring. I have a lot of memories of being driven about places and being in transit.”
West’s investigation into the relationship between color and light is often realized through an engagement between materiality and a given site. According to her, our understanding of color can only be realized through the presence of light. By playing and adjusting color, she brings out the intensity and composition of her spatial arrangements.
“I think we need to be taken out of the ordinary and put into the extraordinary,” she says. “I’m not professing here that my work is extraordinary but it is about giving people an experience that they might not have day-to-day.”
Enter her unordinary spaces of light and color:
