Liza Lou
Untitled No. 11 is a work of quiet minimalism. Made from thousands of white glass beads, the slight tonal shifts in their colour record the hands that sewed them; each bead lightly stained by sweat. Seen from afar, the work evokes the abstract paintings of Agnes Martin, an artist and modern-day mystic who pursued a visual expression of interiority and silence. Both Lou’s beaded works in white and Martin’s paintings share a sense of seriality, linearity, and quietude. Seen up close, Untitled No. 11 reveals the exhaustive, repetitive process of its making, the Zen-like tedium necessary to its form. It is the work of an artist deeply engaged in her medium, a notation of time spent, and an acknowledgement of the many women through whose hands the beads have passed.
b.1969, New York
Liza Lou is no stranger to monotony. She marks the passing of time with the simplest gesture, sewing one glass bead after another or glueing them with infinite patience onto canvas and objects. It is, the artist suggests, a way to remain present to the slow accumulation of making, a meditation on repetitive process. The art writer Leah Ollman describes Lou as the “world’s preeminent poet of beads.” She continues – “Lou has sewn odes and lamentations with them, used them as a means of witness and a vehicle of critique, expanded their grammar.” Lou has always worked with beads – from her earliest tableaux of domestic scenes to her more muted wall pieces. “To be tethered to a material is a burden,” she says of her medium, “I’m always trying to disobey the material and what it naturally wants to do, but also to listen to it.” Since 2005, Lou has expanded her practice to include South African beadworkers at her KwaZulu-Natal studio. Community practice and collective labour now colour Lou’s work, as do the more lasting themes of women’s work and craft in her practice.