Liza Lou
In The Sacrifice, Lou’s offers a nuanced reflection on faith. Raised in an evangelical sect, the artist talks often of her religious unease, yet finds in Christian iconography an intrigue that belies her ambivalence. Such is her sculptural invocation of the infant Christ, the child’s form gilded with glass beads. The Sacrifice is as much a votive gesture of time spent as it is an art object. As the devout work at their prayers, so the artist works at her rituals. Like those of a rosary, each bead that passes through her hands represents Lou’s singular devotion – not to faith, but to process; to the slow labour of her medium. To the artist, her material meditation is itself a kind of quiet transcendence. “Standing back,” she says – seeing the whole made of many glass parts – “I wonder if art can become an act of forgiveness.”
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.