Lilith Piper
Degree: BA Fine Art
University: Falmouth University
Graduation Year: 2020
New Blood Art Commentary
Lilith Piper draws on the rich history of folklore and myth to reimagine archetypes embedded in the collective psyche. From modes of femininity, to sacredness and sexuality, Piper does the work of recovering our deepest held stories and reanimating them in the contemporary world. Working in painting, textile, print, drawing and performance, each medium contributes to the final work in an organic way – fear of suppression becomes an exploration into the ways of the body, which in turn formulates stunningly evocative lithograph prints, as with “The Woman Who Loved to Dance Turned to Stone” (2020). Ritual and fairy-tales find their way into pieces that flicker with the new becoming of form and colour. Like the tales in Ovid’s “Metamorphosis”, figures are fluid and contorted in impossibly possible ways.
Artist Statement
Lilith works with fluidity and form where video becomes moving tapestries, illuminating the fixed medium of painting. Imagery intertwining, a pickilith of objects and obsessions in a time of darkness and hibernation. Living in a world of suppression expressed as a fear of turning to stone. The devotion to the dance begins with ecstatic liberation of the body and an explosion of emotions and relentless rivers of tears. Fabrics beat to the drum that the people used to make when chattering the living energy in to circles of stone.