Red Lodge Clay Center – Short-Term Resident 2017
Born in Kankakee, Illinois, Liz Langyher received her BFA in Ceramics from the Maryland Institute College of Art. As an artist her work centers around an attempt to make and live in a more ecological way, with a focus on childhood environments and landscape as a curated experience. Her current work is focused on the similarities between natural and art objects and contemporary land use as a symbolic artifacts.
“Desensitized, decontextualized, re-contexulized, broken again, forgotten, mislabeled, translated through decades and dozens of languages and hands; the artifact is prized for its innate connection to what is lost; it is a desperate and glorified reference point to the unknown. Telephone poles, wind turbines, dams, landfills, highways and homes; when once removed from our cultural context and understanding each will perform as abstract artifacts and monuments to the land legacies we leave behind. The creation of objects also follows this path as memory and making collides into an object, an object being the symbol of time and experience. I create objects that reference and act as artifacts as an attempt to see past the present and into the human relationship with object and environment through the use of ecology theories. I want to look forever into the time experience that an object, a vessel, a piece of land, can hold. I do this as an act of catharsis or perhaps as an eulogistic act for a stretch of land and a road and the time between 745 miles.”