Description
‘To Carry’ by Liz Gridley
Artist: Liz Gridley
Title: ‘To Carry’
Medium: Oil on wood panel
Dimensions: 10″ x 8″
Framing: Unframed
Year of Creation: 2024
About the Artwork:
“The gift or burden of holding someone’s last wishes – their care or their intentions. This clear document held near the heart is both heavy and fills me with fire and purpose. Have you thought of asking someone to bear your wishes? Why haven’t you written a will as a gift to those who love you.” – Liz Gridley
About the Artist:
(Artist Bio)
From an artistic interest in the consideration of emotive human experiences, Liz Gridley’s work centers on her experiences of states of hyper-emotion. Distress arises from overstimulation; feelings of overwhelm from external stimuli that cause a physical response in the body. Though the recent revelation of her diagnosis with ADHD has shed light on Gridley’s emotional nature, hyper-emotion remains a core element of her personality and sense of self.
Meditation, contemplative thought, and catharsis regulate this emotional response and re-centres the body, only to then anticipate the next emotional wave. Through contemporary figurative oil paintings Gridley reflects her internal states and connects viscerally with the viewer.
The personal inevitability of death & death care is a point in which dialogue can be culturally celebrated or silenced. Here Gridley’s experience with hyper-emotion makes room for conversation that is often taken for granted or pushed aside as taboo.
Gridley had her debut solo exhibition ‘Empathy, My Witness’ in 2018 at Off The Kerb Gallery following her Major Prize win at the Graeme Hildebrand Art Prize in 2017. She has been a Finalist in a number of awards including the Kennedy Art Prize, Cliftons Art Prize, the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine Art Prize (USA), and the fortyfive downstairs Emerging Art Prize. Gridley has been awarded a place in the “2024 Inaugural Victorian Artists Society Coterie” sponsored by the Hansen Little Foundation. She has also completed recent public art demonstrations and mentored other emerging artists.