HARBINGER / An Installation of sculpture, sound and drawing / 2025

The first showing of Elizabeth’s year-long project in creative collaboration with Deco Publique and The CoLAB. A part of the Coastal Commissions development, a collaborative research project with academics and researchers at Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts.

Exploring our intertwined existence with the birds of the bay, and the use of domestic and commercial chemicals in our ever increasing pursuit of cleanliness and convenience. Harbinger invites us to look and listen to what our environments are telling us, and to question our reality.

Earthworm like cardboard forms inspired by analogue listening devices and amplifiers hold aloft nests of dog hair contaminated with Fipronil, a chemical in pet flea treatment. This tells the tragic story of fur strewn over the countryside, collected by songbirds to line their nests, killing their chicks. 

Fake puddings and oversized, shiny fruits are displayed on stands made from discarded agricultural machinery parts. inviting the viewer to once again consider the symbolism of the poisoned apple and the environmental price we pay to eat ‘perfect’ food contaminated with endocrine disruptors. 

A series of large drawings illustrate imagined landscapes that sit somewhere between the moorland that belongs to the nesting curlews, the folds of the human body, the sands of the bay and the monoculture grasslands that eliminate life in the countryside. Inside the rusty corrugated iron shed amongst subterranean landscapes you are invited to listen alone to a sound piece composed and sung by the artist, using harmony to convey her sadness and love for the birds in decline and the beauty of their song.

The juxtaposing textures and forms in the works convey prescribed neatness opposing wildness, and chemical cleanliness pitched against the natural environments that sustain life.

“We live our lives among the birds and we experience them every time we are outside. We share our food and our environments. We are intertwined. What happens to the birds is happening to us.”