Lizzie Scott is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She has been working with the intersections of textiles, painting and sculpture for nearly 20 years. In addition, she runs an intermittent roving performance laboratory, “The Total Styrene Experience” which aims to create brief moments of an alternative art world based on generosity and experimentation. Her work has been shown throughout the US and Europe.

Question

“In your recent paintings, which you call textile pieces or textile constructions, flexibility is presented in many different forms. The paintings themselves are flexible, their presentation is adjustable, the edges are soft and the center is spongy. Even the overall shape looks like the typical painting rectangle has become flexible and then bent into your loose polygons. Will you talk about the flexibility and your recent work?”

Answer

It’s interesting to me that you begin by calling the Drifters paintings. I mean, obviously they are a kind of painting–they’re painted surfaces. But what’s been important for me about them is the ways they’re very specifically NOT “paintings.” They’re layers of muslin and other fabric sandwiched around bubble wrap, cut into semi-geometric shapes, all sewn together with rough, visible seams, and then painted. They can be folded or rolled or bunched up or hung on the wall or stacked on a table or spread out on the floor. As you say, they’re flexible in just about every sense.

Drifter; 2015; Flasche on muslin, textile, and bubblewrap; 55 x 80 x 3 inches

My early training and first love was painting, and out in the world the work that calls to me loudest is usually painting. But the “discipline” imposed by the limits of a stretched canvas has always acted for me like a rigid cage rather than a space for freedom or invention. When I paint on canvases I make a lot of rules about what I can and can’t do.  I think it’s a kind of withholding, a way of refusing to submit to the authority of the canvas.  It was a problem for me for a long time – the pleasure in art for me is in painting, but the limits within which painting is confined were too high a price.

Since I began making the Drifters, the flexibility has allowed me to get much more involved in the painting. Replacing the canvas with something more organic, something lumpy and squishy that doesn’t have to be stretched into submission has been very liberating. In all of my work I’ve been interested in a kind of competition between the organic and the geometric, and in this work, the geometric shapes really get smashed by the imperfect organic surface and become something more anarchic and eccentric.

Drifter; 2015; Flasche on muslin, textile, and bubblewrap; 48 x 78 x 3 inches

At the same time, because of their material flexibility, the Drifters can be displayed in any configuration. While I’m working on a painting or sculpture there’s always an exchange between the object and me. It’s a kind of dialogue. With these pieces, that conversation never ends. It’s another kind of anarchy, where the author doesn’t control the object. Reading this it’s probably clear that for me the history of painting is bound up in patriarchal authority, and flexibility in all its forms is a feminist imperative.

Drifter; 2015; Flasche on muslin, textile, and bubblewrap; 48 x 78 x 3 inches