Liz West graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2007. She has since shown and created work for solo and group exhibitions, artist residencies, commissions and publications both nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include: Seurat to Riley: Art of Perception at Compton Verney, Warwickshire; Our Colour at Bristol Biennial; Colour and Vision at Natural History Museum, London; Your Colour Perception at Castlefield Gallery New Art Spaces, Manchester; Bursary Awards at Royal British Society of Sculptors, London and Light Fantastic at National Media Museum, Bradford. In 2016 she was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize, Darc Awards and the Lighting Design Awards.

Liz West creates vivid environments that mix luminous colour and radiant light. Working across a variety of mediums, she aims to provoke a heightened sensory awareness in the viewer through her works. She is interested in exploring how sensory phenomena can invoke psychological and physical responses that tap into our own deeply entrenched relationships to colour. Her investigation into the relationship between colour and light is often realised through an engagement between materiality and a given site

Within physical and architectural space, West uses light as a material that radiates outside of its boundaries and containers. She playfully refracts light through using translucent, transparent or reflective materials, directing the flow of artificial light. Our understanding of colour can only be realised through the presence of light. By playing and adjusting colour, West brings out the intensity and composition of her spatial arrangements.

On the Olympus Perspective Playgrounds Liz West shows/showed the following installation(s):

Berlin 2017: "Our Colour Reflection"

Our Colour Reflection creates a conversation between the viewer and the setting using more than 765 mirrors made of coloured acrylic. There are 15 colours in all, and the mirrors with diameters of 30, 40, 50 and 60 cm are set at different heights, so that they reflect and reveal parts of the architecture that would otherwise be invisible, and project colour up into the interior. It is playful, elegant and engaging but also thoughtful. "There is an element of performance to this work; it puts the audience in the forefront, demanding a response, in West’s words ‘physically, emotionally, psychologically or even spiritually.’ Viewers will each have their own perspectives and their own experiences tempered by movement through space and through time. By going unplugged here, West emphasises that while artificial light can be manipulated it can only, at best, replicate the dynamism, shifting mood and changes in quality embodied in natural light." – Francis Pearce

Portrait © Daniel Walmsley

Works © Hannah Devereux