Can breath be art? Liz Larner on sculpting with hair, lashes, leather – and international group exhalation — SkimNews
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- "A Hard Line to Bend" is Liz Larner's first major UK exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, built around single-use plastic she began stockpiling after China stopped accepting American plastic for recycling, with pieces so voluminous she hung them from her studio ceiling
- "Every Artist Gave a Breath" (1988) had artists worldwide breathe onto petri dishes; when shown again in 2022, the agar-grown work had morphed into "beautiful, dried wafers in colour" alongside "really weird blackish-green, really murky and a little scary" growth
- Larner's ceramic "asteroids" such as Nyx (2022) transpose NASA photographs into crenellated, glazed 3D forms, while her wider material vocabulary has long included human hair, false eyelashes, leather, and surgical gauze
- The exhibition's eponymous work draws on the Burney Relief, a Babylonian terracotta plaque some identify as Lilith, whom Larner frames as radical through refusal rather than fight: "she's not a fighter. She just says no. And that's powerful for everyone, not just women."
- Larner was born in 1960 to a California farming family that was sprayed with DDT — now banned — for her first seven years; she studied with John Baldessari at CalArts and ran in 1980s LA's scene at Beyond Baroque alongside Dennis Cooper, Bob Flanagan, and Mike Kelley
Why it matters: Larner's four-decade arc — from 1988 bacteria-on-agar to plastic stockpiled after China's recycling ban to ceramic asteroids lifted from NASA imagery — reframes sculpture as a record of planetary disorder rather than formal play. Her stated refusal of social media is a quiet polemic against an art world she says has become terminally online, where "there's so much pre-knowledge."
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