ELIZE VOSSGÄTTER

ELIZE VOSSGÄTTER (b. 1981, South Africa)
BA(FA) 2002, MFA 2023 (University of Cape Town)
The end is colourful is the artists first international show following a successful local career in South Africa and the recent completion of her Master’s degree at the University of Cape Town with a body of work entitled ‘Gutter Pop’, from which many of these ideas have expanded from.

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She works with raw materials- mostly beeswax - which she contaminates with synthetically produced pigments to create highly saturated works that mediate between an organic, industrial and digital aesthetic. Elize gestures to a post-natural state of which the unknown biodegradable effects of human production and waste – continuously synthesised materials and contagions that co-evolve with organic processes – create a hybrid ecosystem. As such, she observes the tentative co-existence and co-mutation of the human and non-human world.

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Wax is an inherently mercurial medium- sensitive to temperature and preservative by nature- its instability-of-states is used as an analogy with which to explore the relationship between human and natural environments and the themes of temporality and transformation within the context of the heating planet and immanent climate crisis, questioning the capacity for protection and preservation. 

Her work is a constant attempt to seek balance and harmony between contrasting states.

Elize Vossgätter refers to herself as a post-humanist, which at its core is the belief that the boundaries between human and non-human are fluid and that they exist in a constant state of interaction and interdependence, thus decentring long-established Western Enlightenment ideas of what it means to be human. Posthumanism instead, considers the changing relationship between humans and the natural environment that allows for the non-binary and anti-hierarchical interactions. Looking at the natural environment through the lens of posthumanism changes nature from being something fixed, categorised or represented to being dynamic, collective, and lived. 

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“We become so enraptured with each other’s differences: our shades of colours, our multi-fabricated beliefs and languages and origins and powers- we have forgotten to see the view around us and the waste we’ve left in our wake. When it comes to the health of our planet, we are all equally inconsequential.”

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“The tone of my work is waveringly optimistic. I observe the lust-of innovation, the melancholia-of-waste, the comfort of possibilities and the ineptitude of holding on. I express the giddy discomfort of being in this liminal-space — looking to the past to see the scope of the damage, and looking ahead towards plausible futures. Posthumanism presents an intoxicating shift in thinking, a recalibration of scales, from separateness to connectedness, wherein human and non-human agents can co-exist and cross-pollinate…… and to me, colour is the great disruptor.”