Dollhouse’ is an installation focusing on the delivery of text through print and ceramics, in order to create an intimate and personal space. Elizabeth designed a mock dollhouse room, providing a sense of nostalgia and comfort to the viewer, challenged by the content of her poems printed onto the furniture. The fireplace she painted onto the wall includes a drawing of a candle stick holder her brother made, a vase of flowers for each member of her family, and an old fashioned clock displaying ‘5:57’, the usual time her and her brother would be ready in the living room to watch ‘The Simpsons’.

 

The room is surrounded by ceramic trays on the wall with receipts and shopping lists embossed into them, as a response to a course of CBT therapy she did. There is a bear sat on the sofa made from the leftover fabric which she hand sewed, based on a bear her mum helped her make when she was a child, which includes two button eyes taken from her family’s old jackets. The dollhouse theme comes from the title of one of her poems that she wrote as a form of reflection on her childhood. There are ceramic bowls, plates and mugs with embossed lines from poems, sat on top of a footstool with another poem printed on.

Elizabeth is a mixed media artist who specialises in textiles, sculpture and print. Her work provides a therapeutic outlet in which she can explore past traumas in a creative and experimental way, inviting the audience to experience and share that vulnerability and trust through the work she makes. She’s an adamant believer than art should be more about the making than the showing, and being able to use art as a therapy.