Liz Ruest

This series of work, incorporating large, angry marks and colours, melded with quieter pastels to soften the message, deals with the challenge of communicating as a woman. What I’ve been trying to say, over my whole life, is buried under introversion and attempts at being polite, often missing the mark. What would happen if I tried to get all that down, and then worked on making the message palatable?

The techniques, ranging from early, full-bodied mark-making and visceral layers of scraped molding paste, to soft watercolour washes, scribbled analog collages, and detailed scans of geometry diagrams, are layered, printed onto paper, and then gouged into with embossing tools to echo the original marks buried in the piece. If you look closely, you can see the angry marks below the surface, referencing how hard you might need to listen to hear the messaging coming to you.

Liz Ruest merges digital layers of handmade art and ephemera to create abstracted compositions, ranging from recognizable landscapes to textured fields that only hint at the horizon.

Based in Seattle for many years, Ruest’s work has been shown regularly since 2001. In 2019, Liz had her second solo exhibition, Adaptive Horizons, at Lynn Hanson Gallery in Seattle, where she’s been represented since 2017. Her work is in public and private collections in the US, Canada, the UK, Norway, and France.

The artist now lives and works in Vancouver, BC. Her formal education in technical fields (B.Math, University of Waterloo, M. Sci, University of Washington) has been supplemented since 2000 with regular, continuing education in printmaking, photography, collage, and composition.