Can breath be art? Liz Larner on sculpting with hair, lashes, leather – and international group exhalation — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Liz Larner opens her first major UK exhibition, "A Hard Line to Bend," at Camden Arts Centre in London, featuring sculptures made from human hair, false eyelashes, leather and surgical gauze.
- Larner began collecting single-use plastic for her studio when China stopped accepting American recycling waste, with the stockpile growing so large she hung it from her ceiling.
- Her 1988 work "Every Artist Gave a Breath" had international artists breathe onto petri dishes; re-exhibited in 2022, it has since morphed into dried colored wafers and murky blackish-green cultures.
- The show's ceramic "asteroids," including 2022's Nyx, transpose NASA photographs into 3D glazed forms with crenellated, mesmeric surfaces.
- The eponymous sculpture was inspired by the Burney Relief, a Babylonian terracotta plaque some identify as depicting Lilith, whom Larner frames not as a fighter but as someone who "just says no."
- Larner studied at the California Institute of the Arts under John Baldessari and ran with LA's 1980s art scene at Beyond Baroque alongside Dennis Cooper, Bob Flanagan and Mike Kelley, a milieu she contrasts with today's "terminally online glare."
Why it matters: Larner's exhibition reframes discarded materials — plastic waste, breath cultures, NASA imagery — as sculptural material, building on a career that has run in the US since the late 1980s but has largely skipped British institutional programming. The Camden show gives UK audiences direct access to a sculptor who has consistently turned invisible or discarded matter into objects that demand physical, in-person looking.
Ask SkimNews
