"PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island - One of my first encounters with the work of Liz Collins was her installation for the New Museum's 2017 exhibition Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon. Filling a narrow, dimly lit room, "Cave of Secrets" (2017) created an immersive environment that encouraged people to stay, engage with the work, and socialize. That installation also asserted no hierarchy across the various media and craft techniques employed in her lush textile-based works. That same quality is central to her mid-career retrospective, Liz Collins: Motherlode, at the RISD Museum."
"Curated by Kate Irvin, Motherlode offers an expansive view of a body of work that refuses to sit still, shifting form over time, yet carrying a consistent voice throughout. The show begins with Collins's early work in fashion (1999-2004), which saw her namesake knitwear line included in New York's Fashion Week from its launch with her thesis show. Also featured is her decade-long collaborative performance and installation project, Knitting Nation, as well as design projects, and her textile-centered visual art practice."
"Collins's thorough knowledge of textiles and their manufacture undergirds much of her production, from the garments she made for her fashion label to the monumental fabric works created more recently. The artist regularly employs scale and color to animate her often abstract compositions, with a consistent focus on the material itself, calling attention to what holds a piece together, as in "Royal Embrace" (2019) and "Head" (2023), or the ways some works seem always to be on the edge of unraveling, as with "Euphoria II" (2016)."
Liz Collins's work spans early fashion design, collaborative performance, and large-scale textile-based visual art, emphasizing material knowledge and craft techniques. Immersive installations like "Cave of Secrets" create social environments and erase hierarchies among media. Projects include a namesake knitwear line shown at New York Fashion Week and the decade-long Knitting Nation collaboration. Recent monumental fabric pieces foreground scale and color while focusing attention on construction and fragility. Specific works such as "Royal Embrace" and "Head" highlight joins and supports, whereas pieces like "Euphoria II" suggest imminent unraveling, combining durability with perceptible vulnerability.
Read at Hyperallergic
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