Since the 1980s, Liz Larner (b. 1960) has been exploring and extending the conditions and possibilities of sculpture. Employing materials ranging from the sculptural to the mundane, including ceramics, bronze, gauze, rubber, chain, leather and bacterial cultures amongst others, Larner’s works are informed by the relationship between object, viewer and their surroundings, exploring the manifold qualities of each medium. In the late 1990s, the artist started working with ceramics, experimenting with the firing and glazing process to create works harboured out of moments of unpredictability and chance. Recent works by Larner include wall-and floor-based pieces created out of single-use plastic components. By modifying their structure and use value, she reverses the process of decay and decomposition, transforming everyday waste materials into aesthetic form.
‘Liz Larner’s earliest sculptural objects resembled experiments that were on the edge of running out of control. Having begun by making photographs of unstable mixtures in Petri Dishes […] and recording their changes, Larner became more interested in the objects themselves rather than the photographs she was making of them. Gradually she became a sculptor rather than a photographer. She has always retained, however, an interest in the instability of form. […] There is part of almost everyone that prizes stability and predictability, but there is also something that revels in decay and decomposition, especially when it happens in a way that can be made visible – where the entropic meets the abject.’
R. Ferguson, ‘Liz Larner Ceramics: An Introduction’, Liz Larner, exh.cat., Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; New York, Karma, 2016, p. 5
