Elizabeth Schwaiger Studio
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The tension between an ordered world and a chaotic one has always been paramount in my work. The idea of the uncontrollable manifests itself in my paintings through images of unbridled nature, depeopled spaces, charged gestural mark, or uncanny atmospheres. These motifs of the untamable push against those of the human proclivity to hem in, to quantify, to name, and to otherwise order or control — and so in my past work this plays out in layered images where overgrowth threatens to pull through one time or dimension to overpower architectural interiors, or in collections of art and artifacts that become so numerous as to undercut their own sense of meticulous cataloging and rigorous order, or in other instances, in spaces of political power flooded physically and allegorically with powers beyond the control of any who gather there. In short, I’ve always dealt with the concept of an overwhelmingly powerful cosmos pushing in, either as a consequence of our own hubris or in sheer indifference to our flailing and misguided attempts to dominate it.
My newest body of work marks a development in this line of thinking spurred by profound changes in my personal life. The genesis of these paintings began during my first pregnancy and have continued while learning to be a new mother. There is no greater teacher in the ways of chaos and the limits of control than a baby and the process of bringing one into the world. In pregnancy, even the boundaries of one’s own body, no, even the penultimate boundaries of one’s own mind cannot be relied upon as selfhood and will are ultimately sidelined by a deeper, ancient programming. The greatest chaos of the natural world can not be fended off as it is welling up within you from your very core. Anxieties and hopes are no longer intellectual or emotional realities but a physical knowledge, a literally visceral experience as your body becomes a portal for new consciousness. And in this riding of and simultaneously being ridden by nature, matrescence grants ineffable insight into terrible truths. Nature is indeed a mother, full of rage, uncontrollable, ultimately destructive, ultimately creative, self-sacrificing, birther of all.
And I’ve seen this new dark knowledge filter into my work. No longer are the battlelines between the tightly controlled world and the looming unknown future so clear, the dissolution of the frame is no longer simply a product of pressure from the outside in, and I no longer feel the need to balance these forces on a knife’s edge. Now, after the lessons of pregnancy and new motherhood, I’m far more willing to see the world in free fall, to welcome being overcome, knowing fully that hope extends through anxieties realized, even bloody ones. Now in my work, chaos bursts through from within. There is no boundary that isn’t trespassed before its inception. The call is coming from inside the house. It is the terror of the sublime, not from a cliff’s edge, but from an inward gaze.
Elizabeth Schwaiger received her MFA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2011. In her decade-long exploration of power dynamics and the climate crises, Schwaiger uses a variegated symbolism of water, fracturing, dimensional overlay, gesture, and dialed levels of representational clarity to construct images suggestive of the interplay among unseen forces that govern our world. She has exhibited in venues in the UK and the USA including in The Walker Gallery National Museum in Liverpool, The Macintosh Museum in Glasgow, The National Portrait Gallery in London, Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, Glasgow International, Embassy Gallery in Edinburgh, Blue Star Contemporary in San Antonio, and Co-Lab Projects and GrayDUCK Gallery in Austin. Recent projects include NYC solo exhibition Now & Now & Now at Nicola Vassell in 2024 and solo exhibition Pressing Shadows at Gana Art in Seoul in 2023, as well as a solo presentation at the Independent art fair in 2023 presented by Nicola Vassell. She was awarded a residency with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation at Rauschenberg’s studio complex in Captiva Florida in 2019. Her work has been featured in Cultured, Artnet's Up Next, Forbes, The Brooklyn Rail, The Catlin Guide, fields magazine, Hyperallergic, Floorr, Fusebox Written & Spoken, Newfound, Conflict of Interest, Sightlines, and The Austin Chronicle. Schwaiger is represented by Nicola Vassell in New York City.