Liz Collins works fluidly between art and design to produce a wide range of works that are activated by vibrant optical energy and queer feminist sensibilities. Driven by affective and elemental forces, Collins’s work evokes natural phenomena and produces haptic sensual encounters. Her enormous tapestries create an immersive horizon: rainbows flood out of mountain range peaks against a dark sky, conjuring what Collins describes as the “fantasy of a queer utopia that is just out of reach”. This dream is also inflected by environmental peril, as a lightning wheel descends like a spinning cyclone. A moon-like orb pays tribute to the geometric abstractions of visionary artist and designer Sonia Delaunay. This symbolic vision also makes visible its own fabrication: up close, the weave of the tapestry is a fractured pattern, and lines of coloured yarn flow behind the expansive black sky. Evoking a multiplicity of possible meanings, Collins’s work acknowledges our collective states of precarity while allowing us to sense the queer worlds that can be manifested only if we can imagine and materialise them.
This is the first time the work of Liz Collins is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Lex Morgan Lancaster
